rhe Coming Religion 



Charles F. Dole "' 




Class BLz r-f O 
Book • -ID 



'«jO 



GopyiightN^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE 
COMING RELIGION 



THE 

COMING RELIGION 

BV <r 

CHARLES F. DOLE 

AUTHOR OF **THE ETHICS OF PROGRESS,'* ** THE COMING 
PEOPLE,'' "THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY," ETC. 




PSCIENP\^?p 




BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



liu^ 



3^ 



Copyright, 19 io 

By Small, Maynard & Company 

(incorporated) 

Entered at Stationers' Hall 



©CLA268225 : 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



n 



■K^ 



To all readers interested in the great questions of 
religion 

To conservative readers who hold to the reality 
under traditional forms of faith 

To readers who think themselves wanting in re- 
ligious feeling 

To readers skeptical about religion^ but open- 
minded and willing to be persuaded 



CONTENTS 



Chapter 
I 
II 
III 

IV 
V 

VI 

VII 

VIII 

IX 
X 

XI 

XII 

XIII 

XIV 

XV 
XVI 

XVII 

XVIII 

XIX 

XX 



Page 

The Old and the New i 

The New Necessity 8 

The Background of Religion . . 23 

The Religion Behind the Creeds 31 

The New Message 43 

The Proof of Our Religion . . 50 

The Mightiest of all Forces . . 62. 

The Good Life is Natural ... 78 

The Key-note of Life 88 

The World of the Builders . . 95 

The Rule of " Thorough "... 105 

The Democratic Gospel .... 116 

The " Experience " of Religion 128 

Ethical Mysticism 136 

The New Thought of Prayer . . 142 
Christianity and Other Reli- 
gions 152 

The Christocentric Idea .... 162 

The Future of the Church . . 168 
The Modern Religious View of 

Evil >3 182 

Conclusions 192 



THE 

COMING RELIGION 

CHAPTER I 

THE OLD AND THE NEW 

When I speak of the Coming 'Religion and 
venture to call it substantially a new religion, 
I say nothing that ought to shock really rever- 
ent people. The word new is as old and his- 
toric as language is. The process of the 
creation, or the evolution of the world is an 
everlasting reiteration of the old prophetic 
saying, " Behold, I make all things new." The 
marvelous kaleidoscope is always turning, and 
every turn gives a fresh combination such as 
no eye has ever before seen. 

The story of the universe naturally falls into 
epochs, each one of which has its own new char- 
acteristic. Grant, if you like, that the myste- 
rious forces behind the changes of shifting 
phenomena are constant in their pressure. 
Whether or not this is so, their effect is almost 
catastrophic. When the fullness of the age 



2 THE COMING RELIGION 

comes, as when the glacial age drew to its end, 
it is like the breaking up of " the fountains of 
the great deep/' or like the bursting forth of 
the buds in the spring time. Old and out- 
worn things pass away, and new scenes, new 
conditions, new species and races appear. A 
nation is born in a day, at least in the seeming. 
Reach back through the aeons in search for 
the secret beginnings of our world, and we 
find everything at last dissolved in a heat of 
fire mist. Presently, as we return on our 
path upward, we discover what was not to 
be seen at all in the fire mist; namely, the 
elemental constructive atoms, as they play to- 
day in the fires of our sun. We look again, and 
we have something that no thought of man 
could have prophesied when the fiery atoms 
first came to birth, namely, solid crystalline 
structure out of which by and by temples can 
be framed and tools molten into shape. We 
return again, and a new wonder appears: I 
mean the first and lowest type of plant life; 
and again, perhaps after ages, the mystery of 
the earliest animals tenanting a watery earth. 
Presently the mammals are here, new creatures, 
in a world that up to their time could never 
have had prevision of their coming. And 
when the first man, who talks and thinks. 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 3 

comes, it is a new world with a new Hestiny. 
But it is a still more surprisingly new stage in 
the process, when the kind of man appears who 
thinks the thoughts of the infinite and eternal, 
and forgives his enemies, or has no enemies. 

There are those who are constantly crying 
" vanity of vanities," and saying doubtfully, 
" Who will show us any new thing? " and thus 
denying the reality of any law of progress in 
the universe. How can they possibly deny 
progress, and, more definitely, progress toward 
an end that justifies all means and cost, when 
the whole age-long story of science is inter- 
preted to be one glorious march from monoto- 
nous, meaningless star-dust, on and up to a 
being who holds the stars in the grasp of his 
thought and measures their spaces, and stands 
up like a son of God on the earth! If this is 
not a purposive universe, with a plan and a 
destiny and a movement of progress, it is hard 
to see what intelligible interpretation of sci- 
ence is possible. 

The course of human history is doubtless 
evolutionary in the slow working of hidden 
laws and forces, both economic and spiritual, 
urging its course. But it evidently breaks, 
or at least shades, into periods, each with its 
own prevailing mark or idea. Some new 



4 THE COMING RELIGION 

emphasis characterizes each of its periods. 
There is a stone age, as related to the age 
of bronze or of steel; there is a savage state, 
the precursor of a half-civilized era; there 
is tribalism before the age of empires; there 
is at last something substantially new com- 
ing in with a rush, when man learns to turn 
on the colossal forces of nature and to make 
the whole world his work-shop and labora- 
tory. The age of democracy, long heralded 
by the seers, is now upon us like the onrush 
of a great wave of the sea. Who can say that 
mankind ever before caught its significance or 
began to know how to apply it? We live in a 
new era of history, since the middle of the 
eighteenth century. Men everywhere now 
begin to be fairly conscious of the vast soli- 
darity of human interests, and to catch the 
sight of the opening pathway of social prog- 
ress toward which other generations had dimly 
groped. The change when Rome stretched its 
conquering arms over the world of classic his- 
tory, and bound the fate of Greece and little 
Palestine with that of our primitive Anglo- 
Saxon forefathers in their low thatched houses 
by the North Sea, was not so great as the 
change that separates us from the men who 
colonized New England. 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 5 

The story of religion also is a continuous 
series of chapters, each of which begins with 
a new lesson, or message, or gospel, or ideal, 
some of them merely tribal or sectarian ex- 
periments, or wild vagaries born to die ; others, 
again, marking the main track of the advanc- 
ing thought and the broadening spiritual life of 
mankind. What a strange misunderstanding 
of the Bible it was, when supposed " scholars " 
treated it as a single and consistent revelation 
of an absolute and completed religion! There 
are whole strata of successive religions hidden 
away in the pages of the Old Testament. Was 
not the religion of the prophets, and later, the 
religion of the synagogue, at least as new, 
compared with the religion of the High Places, 
and again of the Temple, as the religion of 
Jesus was different from the religion of Herod 
or Pilate? 

The New Testament presents in the course 
of a little over a hundred years the most rapid 
and unceasing story of a developing faith. The 
writer of the Fourth Gospel does not use the 
same dialect that Jesus used. Possibly Jesus 
would hardly have understood this subtle and 
mystical gospeller, for example, in his pro- 
logue. Jesus' teaching was characteristically 
ethical and social. His favorite emphasis was 



6 THE COMING RELIGION 

upon the life of the righteous, the merciful, 
and the meek. He reincarnated the ideal 
of the great prophet whom Micah quotes, 
the high-water mark of the Old Testament: 
" What doth the Lord require of thee but to 
do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly 
with thy God?" The good Samaritan, un- 
orthodox in doctrine, but a good neighbor, 
was acceptable enough to Jesus. On the other 
hand, in Paul's writings, as well as in the 
final framework of the synoptic Gospels, you 
already catch a new and fluid form of religion, 
soon to crystallize into the actual worship of the 
person of Jesus, and into a dogmatic exclusive- 
ness which for hundreds of years would cer- 
tainly have imperiled the life of Jesus himself, 
if we can imagine him to have stood up to 
preach in any one of the great churches con- 
secrated to his name ! For the man thus ideall}^ 
worshiped was not a Christian at all, judged 
by the tests that the new religion presently 
had imposed. 

The fact is, there is not one Christian Reli- 
gion, but many successive or contemporaneous 
varieties of it. They differ according to the 
prevailing emphasis, whether placed upon some 
form, upon a certain order of priesthood or 
government, upon some dogma or other, or 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 7 

upon the nature of the Hfe or the experience 
expected of the believer. The most certain 
thing about them all is that they lay their 
stress upon other points than those upon which 
Jesus placed his own emphasis. Who imag- 
ines, for example, that Jesus ever heard of the 
doctrine of the Trinity ! It is also certain that 
in each case the points of emphasis belong to 
the shifting patterns of the world of the kalei- 
doscope. Ask men in any given church, even 
in the Roman Catholic, to tell you what they 
call the heart of their religion, and see how 
many varieties of answers you will get. We 
are ready now to consider the possibility that 
mankind may be today watching the incoming 
of a new and very wonderful form of religion. 



CHAPTER II 

THE NEW NECESSITY 

There is an almost world-wide complaint to- 
day that people are turning away from the 
churches and temples. There was never so 
much skepticism about the traditional religion. 
Never were men less disposed to accept what 
priests or Bibles say. Man, swinging on his 
little planet, in endless space, the child of a 
remote ancestry beginning in the things of the 
dust, never before seemed to himself so small, 
even at the very hour when his own searching 
questions reveal to him the infinite power of 
the intelligence which dwells in him. New 
forms of the profound old questionings arise: 
Where can we find God? How do we know 
that there is a God? What sort of God is it? 
Does He care for man? Is He infinite and 
perfect? Or, is He perhaps involved along 
with man in the toil and travail of develop- 
ment? Is He one, or perhaps many? Is im- 
mortality more than a dream ? 

Never were men so frank in uttering their 
doubts. Modern literature is full of them. 



THE NEW NECESSITY 9 

Modern biographies such as Huxley's, Miss 
Martineau's, Lord Macaulay's, reveal the same 
fact in startling passages, or, again, in the 
complete absence of any sense of a spiritual 
Hfe. 

On the other hand, the world is fuller than 
it ever was of new interests and possibilities. 
Material successes and wealth are, or at least 
seem, close to the reach of multitudes. Sports, 
pleasures, luxuries, fabulous fortunes are 
everywhere on exhibition. The play of the 
new forces of steam and electricity has made 
everything possible. Only change the indus- 
trial system, multitudes begin to cry, and all 
shall have what once princes could hardly 
purchase. All these outward things seem vital 
and real. Religion in its habitual garb seems 
distant and unreal. 

It is said that the working people are desert- 
ing the churches. They certainly are not 
thinking very much in the terms of a future 
life. They are setting their hearts upon the 
attainment of concrete and social ends, more 
humane conditions of labor, decent homes, 
better chances for their children, fairer dis- 
tribution of the good things of the world'. 
These ends become tremendously important to 
a host of people who have just awakened to 



10 THE COMING RELIGION 

see both the disparities and the possibiHties of 
what we call civilized life. The churches have 
not been very prompt or hearty or intelligent 
in seeing how to adjust their doctrines, their 
machinery, and especially their habitual em- 
phasis, to a whole new set of requirements. 
Did not religion mainly exist for the sake of 
a supernatural life ? Was it not essentially for 
" the worship of God '' ? Was it not the spir- 
itual side of life, and therefore exempt from 
service on the material side? Temples and 
churches have proclaimed this spiritual mis- 
sion for generations. It would really be a 
wonder if ecclesiastics. Catholic or Protestant, 
saw their way under the old forms and names 
to alter outright their point of view and their 
emphasis. They have not done it yet. 

Moreover, many people will frankly tell you 
that they find the preaching of religion and 
the reading of the books of religion and cer- 
tainly the reading of the Bible somewhat tire- 
some. It is probable that this was always so. 
There is no evidence to show that any large 
proportion of people ever enjoyed hearing ser- 
mons or reading the Bible. If people in the 
old Puritan days attended their churches with 
greater regularity than men go to church now 
^(and old colonial records present a darker side 



THE NEW NECESSITY 11 

of the shield), there were certain stern com- 
pelling motives, partly of fear and of force, the 
very use of which infers reluctance on the part 
of the hearers. The fact is, that many of the 
subjects of religion, as usually presented, are 
not very interesting, especially to the imma- 
ture mind. The Bible has certainly a good 
deal of very dry matter in it. The custom of 
hearing formal discourses or lectures with 
pleasure, to the number of fifty-two Sundays a 
year, is mostly an acquired habit. It was 
probably never expected of the average human 
nature, outside of the Puritan and Calvinist 
tradition. 

Meantime, an immense popular change is 
still going on in men's attitude toward the 
church. Whereas they once feared to absent 
themselves from its services, they now feel 
more and more free to go or to stay away as 
they like. Whereas they once feared the super- 
natural powers if they broke the Sabbath, now 
they feel free to drive or sail or play or sleep 
on their weekly holiday. The new question 
comes with multitudes: What good does the 
church do? If it does not do very evident 
good, if it is not interesting, why should men 
expend money and time in order to sustain it? 

Here comes the pressure of a new necessity. 



12 THE COMING RELIGION 

Religion must be real ; it must do some obvious 
good, and its message must be interesting. 
This demand is fair. The churches are finding 
it extremely difficult to meet it. They have 
on hand a large assortment of ideas which 
have hardly more than an historical value. 
They face the way of outworn and supersti- 
tious forms of religion, while a wonderful new 
form of religion is being brought to birth. 
Barring a few works of genius, all the tradi- 
tional text-books and treatises of religion are 
as dead as the old text-books and treatises upon 
science and medicine. How can churches pos- 
sibly go on much longer offering the ideas of 
religion which they have received from the 
bloody hands of men who burned witches and 
persecuted one another for errors of doctrine! 
Already the dreadful thing has come to pass, 
that young men of truthful and genuine char- 
acter, seeking the service and ministry of the 
church, discover that its ancient watchwords 
ring false and those who utter them want 
earnestness. No religion can endure unless its 
preachers are real men. 

One of the chief points of difference between 
the old and the new in religion touches the 
ground of authority. Pretty nearly all the his- 
torical forms of religion were based on some 



THE NEW NECESSITY 13 

kind of outward and conventional authority. 
Moses taught thus : the laws came down from 
heaven; Prophets had visions and heard 
voices; the priests commanded thus; the 
Bible said it; Jesus taught it. Thus the mul- 
titudes believed because thev trusted their 
priests, their prophets or saints, their sacred 
book, their Christ. They were like boys who 
commit their geometry to memory without 
understanding it. Religion was a system of 
aristocracy, where the few ruled or taught and 
the rest obeyed. 

Yet in the early times there was a signifi- 
cant vein of individualism and even of liberty 
in religion. The best of the Hebrew prophets 
were radicals and revolutionists, setting their 
personal vision or word, " Thus saith the 
Lord,'' against the ancient high-places, and 
against not only the priests of Baal but the 
priests of Jehovah. They dared to doubt 
whether the worship at the altars did any good 
for God or man. They ventured to predict 
that the time would come when every man 
would know as much about God as the priests 
or the prophets. '* I will pour out my spirit 
on all flesh." This, they said, was the gospel. 
Jesus was no lover of the priests. Jesus said 
to men, " Why judge ye not even of yourselves^ 



14 THE COMING RELIGION 

what is right ? " Not the Jewish people, but 
the priests put him to death as one who threat- 
ened their system. ReHgious persecution has 
always tended to be ecclesiastical rather than 
popular. The Holy Inquisition at Madrid and 
John Calvin at Geneva did only the same thing 
which the priesthood at Jerusalem did in the 
name of traditional authority in religion. 

The time seems to be now coming when 
men are asking to have sight for themselves 
of the supposed secrets of religion. In a demo- 
cratic age all kinds of aristocratic authority, 
religious as well as social and political, are 
called in question. What do priests or minis- 
ters know about God or immortality more than 
the rest of us? men ask. What can they read 
out of the Hebrew Bible or the Greek Testa- 
ment more than we can read out of the plain 
English Bible? What special advantage, pray, 
had men in the Bible times over the men of the 
twentieth century to legislate about marriage, 
or to teach the nature of the Almighty? Did 
Jesus indeed know all? Was he, who liked to 
call himself "Son of Man," never mistaken? 
Was he not rather the child of his age, ex- 
actly as we are children of our age? In plain 
terms, is there one important teaching of 
Jesus which we today believe merely because 



THE NEW NECESSITY 15 

he taught it, and not rather because it seems 
to us to be true ? 

Here is the immense pressure of a new and 
democratic need. It is not yet as loud as it is 
going to be. No one who has felt it ever for- 
gets it. New voices every day are raised for 
it. I do not say that these voices are always 
pleasant or gentle or modest. They express 
an egotism at times as coarse as the egotism 
of arrogant priests or false prophets. But they 
express a great popular movement. They can 
never again be silenced; they must be met. 
They are right in their conviction that if God 
is at all, He is here and now ; that if He has 
ever made Himself known to any men, then all 
men are likewise His children, and all men 
ought to hear from Him and be assured of 
His reality ; that if He is the All-Father in any 
true sense. He cannot be conceived of as having 
favorite Sons, since all men need His presence 
and help; that if so wonderful a hope as that 
of immortality is based in reality, our reasons 
for it cannot surely depend on any single and 
remote historical event, such as Jesus' resur- 
rection, hopelessly beyond the possibility of 
our demonstration. If religion is real and if 
we are immortal by nature, then all of us, the 
plain people, ought to have some way of know- 



16 THE COMING RELIGION 

ing it, and ought not to be compelled' to take 
the word of some one else for such momentous 
facts. This is to say, that the coming new re- 
ligion must be more democratic than religion 
ever yet has been. 

Let me guard in passing against a possible 
misunderstanding. I have no idea of the de- 
mocracy, whether political, industrial, intellec- 
tual, or spiritual, as a dead level of mediocrity. 
There must and will be leaders to the end of 
time. The world will always need specialists, 
experts, trained engineers, captains of indus- 
try; it will also always need men of vision. 
Wherever there is real authority, men will 
gladly listen to it. Whenever there comes to 
be a consensus of real authority about religion 
on the part of the men who can say, " We 
have seen," "We have felt," "We have ob- 
served or experienced," men will willingly 
take heed. The man who learned the royal 
fact that " it is more blessed to give than to 
receive " will be authority on that subject. 
But the day has gone by when any leader or 
prophet may claim a monopoly of his message 
or his vision. Perhaps he saw the new star 
from the vantage point of his high observatory. 
But it will not be credible that he really saw it, 
if he remains the only one who saw it, or unless 



THE NEW NECESSITY 17 

he can show it to any other observer who is 
wilHng to stand at his point of view. So much 
for democratic authority. 

I almost hesitate to say that the coming reli- 
gion will be rational. This has been said so 
often that it begins to sound tiresome. I do 
not mean that everything in this vast world 
can be reduced to a plot and defined in simple 
propositions. We doubtless live in a realm of 
mystery. There is a mystery about space and 
time, about the thought of " the infinite," about 
the origins of all things, about love and con- 
sciousness and life itself. You know life when 
you cannot define it; you know beauty and 
music though they transcend all your mathe- 
matics; you love, and whether you give rea- 
sons for your love or not, it passes the bounds 
of reason. Religion too belongs with the deep 
and ultimate values. You can reason about it 
and reason toward it, but reason is at best 
only one element in it. Most people believe in 
it as they believe in music, or love, or life. 
When therefore I say that religion is reason- 
able, I do not deny the quality of mystery. 
This exists in myself and in every other self. 
But I say it is the mystery of light and not of 
darkness. Wherever we traverse it, reason 
keeps company with us and never leaves us. 



18 THE COMING RELIGION 

I mean that there can be no lasting absurdity 
or contradiction in our universe; that we are 
still in the realm of order and unity; that no 
corner of it is given over to chaos; that all 
that we see or know or feel gives us confidence 
that the order and beauty and fitness continue 
where we do not yet see. 

All this constitutes a new attitude as regards 
men's habitual expectation in religion. Men 
have looked for signs and wonders, and mir- 
acles, the more irrational the better. It has 
not troubled them that the infinite Creator 
should stop the sun in its course to allow a fa- 
vorite general to smite his enemies ! Or that He 
should pile the waters of the Jordan in a heap 
so as to save His chosen people the trouble of 
building a bridge ! Or that Jesus should inter- 
vene in behalf of his improvident host, and as 
if by act of magic suddenly change gallons of 
water into excellent and strong wine! It did 
not trouble men to suppose that in this ex- 
traneous region of supernatural wonder you 
might bring a ship to port through stormy 
seas by the formula of a prayer, while the next 
ship, as well or better manned, not having the 
words of the prayer said over it, should go to 
hopeless wreck! It did not trouble men to 
think that a God had died on a cross to buy 



THE NEW NECESSITY 19 

entrance to paradise for Christians, and espe- 
cially the orthodox, variety of Christians, while 
all Buddhists, Mohammedans, and heretics 
were thrust down to hell ! 

When now we say that the coming religion 
must be rational, we mean that mankind will 
not continue to allow priests or ministers to 
shut up any dark room in the vast temple of 
life, and make this closed place the shrine of 
religion, and still expect their fellows to be- 
lieve whatever preposterous things they may 
be told about what goes on there. We cannot 
believe that any region exists where men must 
shut their eyes and not even try to see? The 
field of religion is the whole wide universe. 
Religion belongs to the whole, and not to a 
corner marked " supernatural." Reverence is 
not to bow with closed eyes ; it is to look up and 
admire and enjoy and be glad. 

Can we truthfully say that religion bids men 
be glad ? This is what we meant when we said 
that the message of religion must be interest- 
ing. A gospel literally means '' good news," 
surely not bad or sorrowful news. But men 
have not commonly understood this of reli- 
gion. How many out of all the hundreds of 
millions of people in Christendom can honestly 
say that their religion brings them genuine 



20 THE COMING RELIGION 

gladness of heart? It will be my purpose m a 
subsequent chapter to show that the distinc- 
tive note of the coming religion is satisfaction 
and joy. For the present I wish merely to state 
that the need of joy is a valid hunger of man- 
kind. The religion that does not meet it must 
die. The current religions do not meet it, ex- 
cept for the few. The need of the democracy 
for all good things is on a colossal scale. The 
world hitherto dull and dumb is coming to 
consciousness. It is not now enough to sat- 
isfy the wants of a few people. The demand 
is to bring a sufficient supply for the average 
man. 

Meanwhile modern conditions of human life 
are startlingly unsatisfactory. I do not say 
that the weary cost of the centuries has wrought 
no wonders of amelioration. The lovers of 
liberty, the patriots and the prophets, the host 
of the humble lovers of men, surely have not 
lived in vain. Their grandest boon is that they 
offer us the sight of their visions. The many 
begin to see and to desire what they saw. Did 
a Christ love men and believe in them enough 
to die for his faith? Then millions of us can 
never be content till all men love and believe 
likewise. Did one man have joy and satisfac- 
tion in his religion despite disappointment and 



THE NEW NECESSITY 21 

suffering? We cannot bear it that men shall 
continue to bear disappointment and suffering 
and not enter into the wonderful heritage of 
full and all-round manhood, for the purchase 
of which every brave effort in the past has 
been put forth. 

The fact is that we have been building the out- 
ward framework of our civilization in the last 
hundred years faster than we have constructed 
the inner and vital reality to match and sustain 
it. We have constructed a marvelous scaffold- 
ing for the temple of humanity. There was 
never such cost of material. There were never 
such forces set free. But where are the toilers 
and builders of the great temple? A multi- 
tude of them are ill fed, ill housed, on the 
streets, exposed to perils. Where are the 
happy workers, with a song in their hearts, 
worthy of the greatness of their task? They 
are here, you can listen at times and hear the 
song; it is a real song and all will learn it at 
last, but now the singers are few; the task- 
master still sets the pace of the work; the cry 
of the oppressed is yet to be heard. The world 
was never so rich as now ; it had never before 
so much light ; it had never so many voices of 
those who believe in " the eternal goodness.'' 
But it never felt before such mighty yearn- 



22 THE COMING RELIGION 

ings, such deep needs, such stirrings of sym- 
pathy. No! there was never such a call for 
a veritable religion, simple, interesting, prac- 
tical, ethical, reasonable, spiritual, gladsome, 
commanding, democratic. 



CHAPTER III 

THE BACKGROUND OF RELIGION 

It may be that some reader is already asking 
the question whether reHgion is a real subject. 
This doubt is certainly in the air. Religion 
has so long been associated with darkness, 
mystery, unreason, death, a future life and 
the unknown, that many persons are more or 
less consciously skeptical about it. Sometimes 
they tell us frankly how they feel. '' We are 
not religious at all,'' they say, perhaps flip- 
pantly, again in a tone of regret, like men who 
cannot enjoy or understand music. " We 
never have had a thrill of religious experi- 
ence," they say ; " we have never seen visions ; 
we have had no sense of the presence of God; 
God has never made Himself known to us. 
We have tried to pray, but no answer has 
come back; we have attended church, but we 
have not found religion; the fact is, we have 
no religious nature." What can anyone say 
to this frank and honest statement of the atti- 
tude of a considerable number of men and 
women whose opinion and character everyone 
respects ? 



24 THE COMING RELIGION 

I wish now to show that there is a great deal 
more rehgion in the world than most people 
are aware of ; that there is a great background 
of religious reality with which we are all 
vaguely in touch. We all share it; it belongs 
to us and we belong to it; it is our birthright 
and the mark of our humanity. 

I can illustrate what I mean here by the fact 
of the constant presence in our consciousness 
of the blue arch of the sky. Multitudes of men 
seem hardly to think of its existence; they do 
not watch it ; they go into no ecstasies over its 
beauty and its unfathomable depths ; they take 
dully as a matter of course the shining of the 
stars; they do not even know the names of 
the planets. And yet they live in the presence 
of the sky. Darken it or cut off the sight of 
it, or remove it, or blot out the stars, and the 
dullest of us would note an immeasurable loss 
in our lives. The truth is, the reality of sky 
and starlight and sunshine constitutes what 
we may call the background of our existence. 
This is so whether we take these things defi- 
nitely or not into our consciousness. Here 
they are nevertheless, and most of us mind 
them more than we imagine. 

I might make use in a similar way of the 
undeniable fact of the mysterious force of 



THE BACKGROUND OF RELIGION 25 

gravitation which the world of men hved by 
for thousands of years without even having 
any name for it. Or I might use the equally 
marvelous and quite unseen force of electri- 
city, whose flashes and strokes men once 
thought wholly exceptional, supernatural, and 
terrible, but which we now count upon as a 
constant, mighty, and beneficent presence in 
every village, and which we assume as pervad- 
ing the earth. I wish to suggest that in a very 
large and yet real way the field of religion 
likewise lies about us and over us and makes 
an essential part of us. 

Let us not be ashamed to admit that the 
beginnings of man's spiritual life, in the case 
of the whole human race as in the case of each 
child, were humble. The childhood of the race 
was doubtless haunted with blind dreads and 
terrors, — terrors of the darkness, terrors of 
the forest and mountains, terrors of the sea. 
Perhaps every child still has to pay tribute to 
this primitive inheritance of apprehension. It 
does him no lasting harm any more than it did 
to his forefathers. But it distinguishes him as 
a child of men and not of the beast. The being 
who dreads and fears has begun to think and 
forecast. Fears mark the path of sympathy, 
mutuality, co-operation for defense, and finally 



26 THE COMING RELIGION 

love. The dread of the unseen powers of the 
darkness is a step toward understanding the 
Hght, and the law by which it throws shadows. 
What is it, behind and within man, urging him 
to strive and climb, compelling him, a child of 
the dust who once only beheld the things of the 
dust, to lift himself up and look into the sky and 
begin to live the free life of a son and a citizen 
of the universe ? It is a power not himself, but 
mightier; it is an inward spiritual gravitation 
and attraction ; it is, in a word, the power that 
makes religion. It is not yet essential that 
man should even name it rightly; he may call 
it one or think it many; he may misinterpret 
its meaning and be unaware of his own des- 
tiny. Yet this power of the unseen life urges 
him and never leaves him. 

Do you mean to say, some one asks, that 
the wild and monstrous vagaries of supersti- 
tion of which the world at vast cost has even 
now hardly rid itself, have really a reli- 
gious significance? Yes, we answer, as we 
give value in the processes of life to the dark 
beginnings of the sprouting seed under the 
clod. The savage who feared the unseen gods 
and tried to propitiate them was more than the 
animal who never knew enough even to fear. 
The man who, praying to his unknown god for 



THE BACKGROUND OF RELIGION 27 

bread and offering his first fruits for the gift 
of the harvest, dimly stretched upwards to the 
light and thus gave his soul growth, seems to 
me rather more respectable than his modern 
descendant who merely despises the history of 
man's early childhood, or thinks his own ego- 
ism to be the center of existence. It is good 
to be emancipated from fear of bogies, but it 
is not good to be merely emancipated, if the 
mind is straightway filled with a new cohort of 
equally selfish fears about the unseen microbes. 
The superstition of grown men, or of men who 
ought to be grown men, is dreadful, not the 
superstition of children who do as well as they 
know. We recall Wordsworth's familiar 
lines : 

" Great God ! I 'd rather be 
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn, 
So might I, standing on some pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, — 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

The early men, however, seem not to have 
been wholly weighted with superstitions and 
terrors. Their world was also a bright world, 
with joy and feasting and rude games in it. 
If unseen powers were sometimes their ene- 
mies, so were unseen powers also their friends. 



28 THE COMING RELIGION 

The god was the father of his tribe. "A 
wild and preposterous error ! '' you say. No. 
Here was the beginning of a mighty thought. 
There was goodness, kindness, mercy, forgive- 
ness over and beyond man's Httle Hfe. Who 
can call this an irra.tional thought? Is there 
no goodness at the heart of the world? Where 
then do goodness and mercy come from? For 
man is only that which the life in and through 
the universe makes him. Perhaps we shall see 
that the bold and preposterous thing is to deny 
the reality of goodness, mercy, fatherhood as 
the ultimate facts of the world! 

At any rate, here is the fact that somehow 
mankind has been prompted on a grand scale 
to look upward, to feel out for an unseen Power 
of goodness, like the tendrils of a climbing 
plant stretching for support. The vine may 
not know that it will discover a trellis, but its 
nature compels it to spring forth and seek one. 
So in some form man is made to desire that 
which is higher, greater, better than himself. 
The wonder is that nothing finite can satisfy 
him. He tries all kinds of experiments in his 
search for deity. The fetish, the family god, 
the tribal god, the god of the nation, the god 
only a peer among other gods, the god of lim- 
ited goodness or power, the god of a single 



THE BACKGROUND OF RELIGION 29 

creed — no finite god suffices. The one God 
that man's imagination requires and feels after 
is seen at last to be the supreme life of the 
universe. This is not an abstract God, whose 
qualities have been reduced to a bare concep- 
tion of absolute Being; it is the Life and 
Power and Goodness in whom inhere all real 
values that make the world. 

One reason, indeed, why many men at pres- 
ent deny God is because the hunger of their 
souls remains unfed by any of the familiar 
creedal conceptions. The god of the churches 
is not good enough for them. Ask anyone, 
however, whether, if he knew that behind all vis- 
ible things there is a Life, both beyond us and 
within us, real, mighty, righteous, friendly, lov- 
ing, out of which we come, in which we may 
rest, in whose companionship we need never be 
lonely, in the sight of whom we need never have 
a fear, he would not be glad to be conscious of 
this reality. This idea in a large way meets 
a need, a longing, an instinct in the heart of 
every one of us. It answers to our quest, as 
the solid stone wall answers to the tendrils of 
the vine. I believe and wish to show that life, 
with its mingled experiences, the impress of 
the strange and beautiful world around us, the 
social bond, the pressure of great human prob- 



30 THE COMING RELIGION 

lems, the lessons of friendship and love, is 
found to be one mighty structure of religion, 
within and behind which a real and living Pres- 
ence reveals itself. We do not have to prove 
this. We have merely to open our eyes and 
watch. It proves itself, as gravitation does, or 
the electrical energy. 

We reach here a large and sympathetic view 
of the significance of a very wide range of re- 
ligious customs and observances. There is 
little that we can afford altogether to despise. 
The question is not what particular form of 
historic religion was right, while all the others 
were wrong, but rather what elements in all 
the historic religions have marked the growth 
of humanity and afforded some kind of trellis 
upon which man's higher aspirations might 
grow. So far as any of these religions appear 
bad or cruel or degrading, it is because we 
have come to view them in the light of higher 
and more noble forms of religious thought and 
feeling. We must cease to be offended on ac- 
count of the variety or the difference of reli- 
gions. Our quest is for the religion that is 
behind and under all religions. For it is this 
deeper religion that we shall discover in all of 
us, common to man. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE RELIGION BEHIND THE CREEDS 

We are often told that the people of a country 
are Catholics or Protestants. We may be told 
that in England or the United States so many 
millions are Methodists or Baptists. These 
names are largely on the surface of the life of 
the people. Among those who go to church 
or belong to churches, many express no real 
opinion of their own by their choice of a 
church. They go to church for social or hered- 
itary reasons. It would be interesting to try 
to discover what the religion is in the minds of 
the men whom one meets, behind and under- 
neath their creeds. Would they not be found 
to be far nearer together than they generally 
suppose ? 

Let us go, at least in imagination, into vari- 
ous churches, whether Protestant or Catholic 
or Hebrew, and see what we find. Let us con- 
cede at once that we shall find much that seems 
irrational or vulgar or even ridiculous. There 
will sometimes be false priests and insincere 
ministers. There will be survivals of medieval 



S2 THE COMING RELIGION 

or even pagan thought, ideas, and observances ; 
there will be little to show on the surface of 
'' love to God or love to man." Nevertheless, 
we shall distinguish, involved with various 
discordant matter, a kernel of inestimable 
value. The plain people worshiping in the 
rival churches are one in the possession of a 
more or less keen sense of the essential mystery 
of life, of wonder about its meaning and des- 
tiny, of some kind of trust that life is worth 
while, of hope that it works for good and not 
for evil, for continuance and significance and 
not for futility and death. They are one in a 
sense of human frailty and need, and often 
also, though not always, of discomfiture, dis- 
harmony, error, and wrong-doing; and in a 
nameless longing for rest, harmony, peace, 
fullness of life. They are one in a sense of duty 
or obligation to a higher Power. 

Moreover, these people are in church not as 
bare individuals each for himself ; they belong 
for the time to an order or brotherhood. They 
stand together for certain ideals, both for the 
personal life and for humanity ; — ideals of jus- 
tice, sincerity, mercy, peace, and good will. At 
their best, they purpose to go the way of these 
ideals and to translate their vague aspirations 
into conduct. They are coming also to be one. 



THE RELIGION BEHIND THE CREEDS 33 

Hebrews and Christians (we might add Mo- 
hammedans, Buddhists, and others) in re- 
sponse to the challenge of a certain personal 
ideal of the perfect life. They do not give this 
personal ideal the same name; the elements 
that make it are never quite the same in 
any two fellow worshipers; the figure of the 
Buddha, or the Moses, or the Christ, caught in 
the camera of each man's imagination, could 
never have been the actual person of any man 
who ever lived. This difference in detail does 
not matter. The fact is, that there is a grow- 
ing oneness among men as to the kind of ideal 
person who can be called " the image of the 
divine,'' the " God-man," namely, the most per- 
fect thought of the man (or woman) whom 
each one would wish to be like. 

What shall we say of the religion of multi- 
tudes of men who never go to any church? 
Perhaps half the inhabitants of Christendom 
belong to this class. Great cities like New 
York and London contain millions of them. 
Are they therefore heathen? Have they no 
religion? Those who know them best will tell 
you differently. These multitudes in fact have 
very much the same deeper religion that Tol- 
stoi attributes to his simple Russian peasants. 
They have a faith in a righteous God, they rec- 

3 



34 THE COMING RELIGION 

ognize ideals of justice and goodness, and they 
hope that even their dull lives count for some- 
thing in the great universe, and that their 
sufferings are not permitted for naught. A 
certain faith, under the bond of which the 
individual man dimly thinks of himself as a 
child or member or citizen of a vast order, 
lies in the background of the consciousness of 
common men in churches or out of them. It 
easily awakes at the stirring of a new love, 
at the stroke of a loss, in the face of death, at 
the command of a new duty. No one is wholly 
a man unless this element that turns toward 
religion is in him. They used to call Mr. 
Robert Ingersoll an infidel, but no one who 
knew the actual Mr. Ingersoll ever could call 
him that. Mr. Ingersoll represented a consid- 
erable number of men, more religious than 
they themselves were aware, quite as reli- 
gious in fact as many church members. 

We have touched on the fact that man has 
a bias to belong to something, to some order, 
fellowship, or brotherhood larger than himself. 
This instinct is the stuff out of which religion 
is born. It is said that man is essentially brutal 
and selfish. But man is also essentially social, 
and the social impulse is always at work lift- 
ing him out of his animalism and selfishness. 



THE RELIGION BEHIND THE CREEDS 35 

Thus, there is a sort of rehgion of the family. 
Fidelity and loyalty are the marks of this do- 
mestic religion. How much does the individ- 
ual owe to his family? Everything, we an- 
swer, that the good of the home demands. 
There is an infinite element in this common 
domestic religion; who is so mean as to be 
bought or intimidated to betray his home, or 
children, or brothers, or to disgrace his par- 
ents? The most timid woman becomes heroic 
under this common pressure of family devo- 
tion. Perhaps the primitive worship of an- 
cestors helped to develop it. However this 
may be, it behaves as if it grew out of the soul 
of the universe. No priest's religion is more 
genuine or fundamental. 

The religion of the family opens into a 
larger circle of religious reality, touching the 
tribe, or the village, or the neighborhood, or 
the group of our friends. Thousands of plain 
people know a veritable religion of friendship 
or of neighborly fidelity. Men may be seen 
every day neglecting their selfish pleasures, 
their own business, their narrower interests, 
even sometimes their own families, at the de- 
mand of their neighbors' necessities, in times 
of peril by fire, or flood, or sickness, or famine. 
You can count on their loyalty as you count 



36 THE COMING RELIGION 

on the rising of the sun. Who is so poor as not 
to know this kind of friendship? Our point is 
that the devotion of the neighbor or the friend 
is the very core of reHgion. The religion of 
altars, sacraments, and temples is not so real 
and holy. Let no one who knows real friend- 
ship ever suppose that he has no religion. 

Does someone suggest that dogs and horses 
show signs of the same utter and loving devo- 
tion to their masters? We think so much the 
more of the dumb creatures, our fellows in the 
procession of life, but this is no reason why we 
should think less of man. The point that we 
urge is, that there is in the encompassing Life 
out of which we proceed an element of infi- 
nite faithfulness and devotion. What wonder 
if even beasts and little birds share it! None 
the less does it rise to the heights of gladsome 
and willing consciousness in the life of man. 
Man recognizes its significance. It is a reve- 
lation of the universal life. Man becomes 
man and ceases to be brute by giving himself 
to the duties of this infinite social religion. 

A whole ascending group of humane rela- 
tions, each with its appropriate bonds, its con- 
ditions of membership, its costs and dues, its 
satisfactions and joys, now arises. Men will 
tell you that their Masonic or Odd-Fellows 



THE RELIGION BEHIND THE CREEDS 37 

Lodge is their church and their religion. 
Thousands of men will tell you that Socialism 
or Labor Unionism is their religion. This is 
not for the small reason that there is a sort of 
ritual or outward religious observance in the 
Lodge, or because men may have taken an 
oath of initiation into a Union. It is because 
they have joined an order of humanity, be- 
cause their comradeship appeals to their chiv- 
alry, because they would go to their death, it 
may be, for the principles that bind them to one 
another. Sometimes they deny religion, but 
their loyalty is itself a deeper religion than the 
words or forms of their denial. 

There are other men whose patriotism is 
their religion. Were Washington and Frank- 
lin, though professing no conventional creed 
whatever, yet venturing their lives and for- 
tunes for the young American nation, less truly 
religious than King George and the Tory 
churchmen, their contemporaries, saying their 
prayers in English Cathedrals? 

Others too have caught the religion of 
humanity transcending all bounds of nation. 
Mazzini was such a man. So was Abraham 
Lincoln. The world of men was their family; 
and wherever the needs of men were they were 
ready to serve. There are men who have gone 



38 THE COMING RELIGION 

beyond forgiveness to enemies; they have no 
enemies, and you cannot make them your ene- 
mies. This is the substance and normal devel- 
opment of that simple, social religion of devo- 
tion which we have found beginning in the 
home, in the tribe, and in the village. Mr. 
Frederic Harrison's religion may be vague and 
inadequate, but so far as it involves the element 
of an infinite loyalty to mankind, it certainly 
partakes of the nature of religion. 

We have been close to the edge of the most 
profound human fact, — the sense of obliga- 
tion or duty. There is an obvious hierarchy 
of duties that go with us into every group or 
order to which we belong. You do not wisely 
say much to children about their rights. You 
tell them of their duty to obey, to serve, to help, 
to stand true. They instinctively know what 
you mean. So too no one is really a friend, or 
a true member of any order or society or city 
or State, who is in it merely for the sake of 
asserting his rights. His membership in it is 
ignoble unless it concerns him with duties and 
services. More largely yet he belongs to the 
family of man, the Order of Humanity, not for 
what he can get out of his fellows for himself, 
but for the sake of what he can contribute to 
the enrichment, welfare, and happiness of all. 



THE RELIGION BEHIND THE CREEDS 39 

Everywhere a more or less constant gravitation 
of duties, with its everlasting and inexorable 
whisper of " Ought/' is upon him. This is the 
nature of the universe of which he is a member. 
There is nothing finite in it; there is " no dis- 
charge in this warfare '' ; no real man would 
have it otherwise if he could. Indeed we con- 
jecture that there can be no distant star where 
the ^ame pressure of obligation would not hold 
good. It belongs in the same realm with 
beauty, order, and love, and constitutes a citi- 
zenship of the universe binding each man to all 
loyal beings. Now, this urgency of duty is 
the spiritual background of religion. Whoever 
hears the voice of duty is listening to " the 
voice of God." Whoever obeys is, in the act 
of his obedience, religious. He is one with the 
eternal and universal life of God. 

A wonderful fact of common experience fol- 
lows. Whoever accepts any duty and proceeds 
to do it, the young child in the household, the 
pupil in the school, the citizen for the sake of 
his town or State, the humane man for an un- 
popular reform, the righteous man in the name 
of justice, — there follows straightway a sense 
of inward rest, trust, fearlessness, and peace. 
Nothing is more common than this fact. Every 
reader must have at some time felt it. We 



40 THE COMING RELIGION 

shall have occasion to speak of this later in 
another connection. We wish here merely to 
remark that this inward sense of peace is the 
substratum of religion. In the act of duty you 
trust that all will be well. You trust, even 
though you do not and cannot see how your 
trust will be justified ; neither do you trust be- 
cause your fellows thank or praise or reward 
you. In the highest exercise of duty you seem 
indeed often to stand alone, and the little world 
of your fellows or comrades, or the members 
of your party and sect, leave you alone. Never- 
theless you march in the dark and trust; the 
fear of consequences vanishes, and perfect 
peace possesses you. There is no higher or 
more accurate word to describe this kind of 
human experience than to say that it is the 
ultimate essence of religion. Is it religious to 
burn incense, or intone a prayer, or feel a thrill 
of awe in the midst of a crowd in the dim 
vaults of a cathedral? Whether you say Yes 
or No, we do say that if there is any reality in 
the upward reaches of the souls of myriads of 
men in many generations, it is religious to let 
one's self go in an act of trust, whenever the 
simplest human duty commands. 

We have certainly traced a line of growth 
in our thought of religion. Let religion stand 



THE RELIGION BEHIND THE CREEDS 41 

for the name of our feeling and thought in the 
presence of the great background of mystery 
that surrounds human Hfe Hke the sky and the 
stars. This presence appears at first to the 
child or the savage as a dim and dark realm, 
full of fears, tenanted with ghosts and mon- 
sters and unknown powers of darkness. But 
even to the early man it is also a realm out of 
which the sun shines and the harvests come, 
and the strange boon of life and the laughter 
in children's eyes. There is not fear only, but 
also a sense of companionship in the mysteri- 
ous groves and the hill-tops where the sacred 
shrines were set up. But by and by, as the 
child becomes a man, and the man becomes 
humanized, there grows to be a joy in the 
desert places, in the lonely hills and forests, 
in the vast spaces of the star-lit heavens ; fear 
passes away; the mystery of darkness changes 
to a mystery of power and light and beauty; 
the man belongs to the mighty universe as a 
child of its Life ; its noblest society here opens 
up into reaches of possibility beyond his pres- 
ent sight; its laws become his normal condi- 
tions of health and welfare; its duties of obe- 
dience, truth, justice, honor, loyalty, devotion 
become his chosen delight. 

We have touched upon facts which charac- 



42 THE COMING RELIGION 

terize the religion behind and underneath all 
creeds. There is reason to believe that multi- 
tudes hold this religion, at least in a dim form. 
It hardly as yet comes to consciousness in them. 
They never think of themselves as religious, 
and conventionally religious people perhaps 
despise them as " unconverted sinners " " out- 
side of the fold." This plain and simple reli- 
gion needs to be interpreted and brought to 
men's consciousness and developed. The full 
possibilities of it remain to be seen. This is 
our task. 



CHAPTER V 

THE NEW MESSAGE 

The new message is a very bold one and will 
not be received at once by every one. It is that 
this world in which we live is God's world. 
This means that it is a good world; that, all 
appearances upon the surface to the contrary, 
goodness is at the heart of it and behind and 
before it. 

The old official message of religion was not 
indeed wholly different, but so far different as 
to make on most minds a totally different im- 
pression. It said that good would win in the 
end, in another realm of existence, but that 
here good and evil struggle in the dark for 
mastery. Its heralds put off the coming of the 
kingdom of goodness indefinitely, and, as we 
shall see, made the good life either for most 
men impracticable or, for a few, a constant 
crucifixion. In brief, they taught that this was 
substantially a lost or wrecked world, and that 
men were lost souls with only a chance of being 
saved. This has been the common understand- 



44 THE COMING RELIGION 

ing of Christianity, called therefore, through 
most of its history, " a rehgion of redemption/' 
This is still a current teaching in tens of thou- 
sands of churches. Great creeds, confessions, 
hymns, and orders of devotional service are 
based on this idea, and are repeated every 
Sunday by millions of people, with but little 
sense on the part of the worshipers that the 
words which they utter have changed their 
meaning, almost to the point of hollowness and 
unreality, for all who read modern books or 
newspapers. In the face of this teaching about 
a lost world, we venture to say that this is 
God's world, here and now. 

On the other hand, many will say almost 
too glibly : " Yes, we are aware that this is 
God's world, or at least we have heard it so 
described." But while they say this, few of 
them really believe it. How many act consist- 
ently, as if this were the fundamental fact of 
life? How many take the good of it? It is 
indeed a startling proposition. The mere state- 
ment. This is God's world, with only an " if " 
or " perhaps," is enough to set the blood tin- 
gling for anyone who catches the greatness of 
the message. Nothing greater can be said. 
All wonderful conclusions instantly follow; the 
most exalting emotions — gladness, satisf ac- 



THE NEW MESSAGE 45 

tion, peace, loyalty, good will — spring into 
play ; fear goes out ; beneficent conduct becomes 
the immediate expression of the life. All this 
arises to consciousness in the hour when a man 
tries the key of the lock of the mystery of life 
on which the words This is God's world are 
engraved. 

We said that there is no greater message that 
ever came to man. We can change its form, 
however, and possibly make it mean more. Let 
us say that We are God's children, or, again, 
that God in some true and real sense is our 
Father. We must admit that this is pure an- 
thropomorphism ; in other words, we strain 
language and use the highest and dearest 
words that we know, to express the idea of our 
relation to the mighty universe whose citizens 
we are. But why need we be afraid of anthro- 
pomorphism? Are our best words too strong, 
or rather too feeble ? Do they mean too much, 
or do they not mean too little for our purpose? 
We are only doing the same in religion that 
we are obHged to do in our science; we bend 
the words that early man once framed to rep- 
resent visible things, to make them express 
invisible realities. Force, atoms, gravity, at- 
traction, magnetism, electricity, space, even 
matter, — these words are only symbols ; they 



46 THE COMING RELIGION 

cover mystery, they express the world in terms 
of man. How else could they express it ? The 
wonder is that man can think the world into 
a Universe at all. The words justice, truth, 
love, spirit, God, the All-Father are akin to 
these other words. Do they express the pov- 
erty of our language? Yes, and also like the 
others, the majesty of our thought. Let us not 
be afraid of them and stop thinking, but use 
them as the tools of our thought. 

Let us be bold enough to say the highest thing 
that we can conceive, namely, that there is that 
in the universe for which '' Father " is none 
too good a word. In other words, there is that 
at the heart of the world which cares for its 
creatures or children, which is committed to do 
its best for their welfare. There is a life, not 
less, but mightier than any from which we pro- 
ceed; there is that, not duller than conscious- 
ness, but more supremely conscious, out of 
which our consciousness rises; there is that 
not less intellectual, but more infinitely intel- 
lectual than we are, from which intellect 
springs; there is that which establishes order, 
number, law, unity, beauty. How else could 
we ever know order, science, or beauty ? There 
is that which makes righteousness, and binds 
the world in the pathway of justice and inspires 



THE NEW MESSAGE 47 

love ; and therefore we learn righteousness and 
are born to love. There is that kind of life 
in the nature of the universe, therefore, to 
which we can be loyal, as men who belong to a 
magnificent order of mutual service. There is 
that in the infinite nature, so human, to which 
we are so like, that we can even love God, as 
children love their fathers and mothers. 

All this is involved in our message. It is in- 
volved in our feeblest attempts to think about 
the facts of the spiritual side of the universe. 
There is nothing so high that man ever con- 
ceived about God, which is not included in the 
scope of this thought. And yet, when we have 
said all, we bow in modesty, precisely as the 
true man of science bows before the power, the 
splendor, and the mystery which pass the utter- 
most bounds of his search. The reality does 
not seem less majestic or real because we must 
be modest about it. 

We may sum up what we have said in the 
form of a parable, good, like any parable, only 
so far as it serves to carry a likeness to our 
meaning. Here is an apple tree that a man sees 
for the first time. He does not know whether 
it is poisonous or wholesome. Its branches are 
gnarly ; its bark is rough and hurts his hands. 
He comes upon it in winter and he does not 



48 THE COMING RELIGION 

know whether it is alive or not. He sees it 
again in the beauty of its blossoms, but pres- 
ently its flowers pass away and he is disap- 
pointed. The little green apples appear, and 
the man finds them hard and sour. Perhaps 
he condemns the tree as worthless. 

Where now is the error in the man's judg- 
ment of the tree ? How is he ever to know the 
nature of an apple tree? He knows it, we an- 
swer, by the first ripe apple. The whole tree at 
its best is in the fruit. But the life of the tree is 
more than any of its fruit; it is that which 
makes the fruit. Why shall we not say, like- 
wise, that we know the life of the universe in 
the highest ripe fruitage which the universe 
produces? The life of the world is more than 
man, but all its life, power, conscious joy, intel- 
lect, beauty, truth, and goodness is epitomized, 
whenever we see a single mature and all-round 
man. This was the truth in the old notion of an 
incarnation in one man, the Christ. It was true 
as far as it went. But it did not go far enough. 
What should we say of the tree that brought 
forth only a single ripe apple, while all the 
rest of the product remained green and worth- 
less! Our message is, as sure as this is God's 
world, that all the apples are destined to grow 
to ripeness and use. The message is, not merely 



THE NEW MESSAGE 49 

that one was God's son, but that all are God's 
sons. We shall presently go on to consider 
how rational this is, albeit very wonderful. In 
fact, it is the only view of the world that yields 
both rationality and inspiration. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PROOF OF OUR RELIGION 

We propose now rather briefly to dismiss a 
number of questions, at least for the present. 
There is the question about God, What kind 
of God is He? Is He all-powerful and all- 
wise? Had He a beginning or no beginning? 
Did He foresee, know, and even predetermine 
all things? Is He alone unchanging while all 
things change? There are strange notions 
abroad as men speculate over these profound 
questions of existence. " What if God is not 
omnipotent ? " it is asked. '^ What if God too 
is in process of evolution upwards ! '' some say. 
Why may there not be other divine beings and 
not one God only? say the " plurahsts.'' What 
if some of these beings are not good but evil? 
I do not say that these questions are unim- 
portant. I suspect that every one of them 
arises from a certain point of view and is re- 
lated logically to a certain kind of conduct, and 
moreover that the point of view may be practi- 
cally related to the quality of the life that a 



THE PROOF OF OUR RELIGION 51 

man is leading. I suspect that there are points 
of view from which one's vision is more or less 
disturbed or partial, and also there is a point 
of view from which, if we can attain it, the 
universe appears in its wholeness and reality. 
I surmise that no point of view is central that 
allows the beholder to break the world up either 
into chaos or a conflict of powers. I do not be- 
lieve that any mind can remain content with 
the conception of a weak or finite or changing 
or growing God. One might pity, but could 
never trust such a God. The mind of man, as 
we have seen earlier, cries out, as if heaven- 
born, for the infinite and the eternal, and rests 
with nothing less. But for our present pur- 
pose I can only suggest, in passing, the gran- 
deur of the problems raised by these questions 
about God, or, if you please, about the nature 
of the universe. Man is no mean creature 
whose mind is made to grapple with these won- 
derful questions ! 

I shall also let the vast problem of evil pass 
here, with only brief mention. I believe that 
we shall find it to be the shadow cast by the 
light. In other words, the things called evil 
belong to time, but all real good is of the nature 
of eternity. We are already adapting our 
knowledge of the world to this conception faster 



52 THE COMING RELIGION 

than we imagine. Thus, a few generations 
ago, man stood in terror before the fiery vol- 
cano; in its pit evil powers worked ruin for 
man. Now we go to visit the place of fire as 
to an entertainment, and look down into the 
tremendous crater, Vesuvius or Kilauea, as we 
watch the progress of a thunder storm, and 
recognize no evil whatever, but merely the 
working of the friendly forces that made our 
earth. Fire burns, but no modern man wishes 
to change the nature of fire. 

Again, we all face throughout life the risks 
of loss, accident, pain, and death; we dread 
suffering. Would we, however, if we could, 
take the risks out of life and reduce it to the 
monotonous terms of smoothness and comfort? 
What if, in the very nature of things, the 
unity, the beauty, the goodness, the love, the 
life of the world is all compounded and made 
to grow out of the working together of those 
mingled elements like the seething, internal 
fires of the earth, that, when felt so near that 
they hurt us, are named evil, but otherwise are 
innocent? The world is learning that " evil " 
is at least one of the costly processes through 
which life mounts upward. Call it an aspect 
of the under side of the work of the mighty 
loom on which higher life is woven into form. 



THE PROOF OF OUR RELIGION 53 

We leave this only as a hint to provoke thought. 
We could not live in this finite life and know 
and grow and love without " evil '' ! 

A deeper and more practical question 
presses. How may we really know that there 
is any God? or, that goodness is at the heart 
of the world ? Where is the proof of our splen- 
did message? Now, there happens to have 
been a long line of men and women who give 
us a straight, simple, and very practical answer 
to this question. They say something like this 
to us : " We do not pretend to make an argu- 
ment that shall demonstrate the reality of God. 
It is borne in upon us and it " finds us,'' as 
reality is apt to do. We should as soon think 
of demonstrating our own existence, equally 
a mystery. As we assume our own personal 
identity, so we assume the inner causing 
life and mind of the universe. We defy 
anyone to offer a proposition so intellectual 
as this; we defy anyone to disprove it, or to 
set up any thought of the universe so rational 
as is the thought of God. We assume it as 
in the realm of outward nature we assume 
matter, though no one ever saw an atom of it. 
We proceed straightway to live and act as if 
the good God ordered our lives. We obey His 
laws, and we trust in Him ; we live as if in His 



54 THE COMING RELIGION 

presence, as men trust in the action of fire and 
water, or build houses on their faith in gravita- 
tion. We act thus, as we should naturally act 
in God's world, and the more exactly our con- 
duct tallies with this idea, the act with the 
thought, the more completely our lives are sus- 
tained. The world answers to our trust more 
and more satisfactorily, as God's world would 
be expected to answer. We call this constant 
fact of experience as good a form of proof of 
the message of religion as any actual demon- 
stration can be. The food nourishes us as 
proper food should. The ship sails and re- 
sponds to her helm. The world behaves like 
a universe, whenever we use it so. Nothing 
else works or makes sense, and this does work 
wonderfully well! 

This is really the same kind of demonstra- 
tion that we employ with our scientific theories. 
We hit upon them at first almost as if by acci- 
dent. A falling apple suggests to Isaac New- 
ton the theory which binds the solar system. 
The conception pleases the intelligence and 
seems to fit known facts. It involves no con- 
tradiction or affront to the reason. The work 
henceforth is to try it in as many actual cases 
as possible and discover whether it does or does 
not give satisfaction. 



THE PROOF OF OUR RELIGION 55 

The conception of matter itself, common and 
simple as it is, albeit mysterious, follows the 
same principle. There is that everywhere 
about us which makes on us the impression 
of hardness, resistance, inertia. We learn to 
add, what no child or savage would ever have 
thought of, namely, impenetrability. But we 
know less of the nature of matter the more 
we study it. It proves presently to be invis- 
ible, only making its effect of color or size 
through our organs of sense. We may even 
come to think of it as consisting of whirl- 
ing vortices of force, or as composed out of 
a still finer substance, as fine as " spirit," 
which we call ether, — a word to cover a 
deeper mystery, as well as our own ignorance. 
Nevertheless, whatever we call it or imagine 
it, we all still use the name and the idea of 
some kind of substance. We behave as if we 
lived in a material world. We respect the hard- 
ness and the inertia of matter, and live as if 
matter were real. It is real in the large sense 
that all material manifestations are related to- 
gether in a realm of cause and effect, of law, of 
orderly succession upon which we depend and 
in obedience to which our outward civilization 
is based. On one side we touch mystery, on the 
other side we know enough for all the practical 



56 THE COMING RELIGION 

purposes of life; we see no limits to the ex- 
tent of our further knowledge. All this knowl- 
edge and the practice that follows it proceed 
from an act of trust in the assumed reality 
of matter. 

Now the men of religion tell us the same 
things of their trust in the reality of God. 
The world not only behaves to them as a 
material world, but they cannot understand it 
or get on with it unless they treat it and live 
in it as God's world. The spiritual aspect of 
the universe, in which duty, truth, beauty, and 
order lie, needs as much to be accounted for as 
the material aspect of the world. 

This line of thought is all the better for being 
extremely comprehensive. It rests upon no 
narrow line of sectarian experience, confined 
to evangelical or orthodox, or Protestant or 
Catholic, or Christian believers. It appeals to 
the universal experience of man. Let us cite 
the case of a man widely known in American 
literary and public life, the late Edward 
Everett Hale. Here was a notable instance of 
a man who from early childhood lived and 
thought naturally and habitually as a child of 
God and treated this present life like a room in 
his father's house. He tells us that he always 
held the thought of the infinite .Power behind 



THE PROOF OF OUR RELIGION 57 

all things as " Our Father." He preached as 
his favorite Gospel: You are all God's chil- 
dren; live as His children. In this faith he 
sustained the common lot of man and bore his 
share of sorrows and troubles, through more 
than eighty years. All denominations united at 
his death in praise of this man's noble and prac- 
tical religion. What man in America ever had 
a more effective, more useful, or happier life? 
The world answered to his trust in it, as you 
would expect of a rational and divine universe. 
Let us take now a very different case. It 
shall be the narrow, austere, ultra Protestant, 
almost fanatical mother of Mr. Edmund 
Gosse, as described in his book " Father and 
Son." The details of her faith in which she 
and her little group of " Brethren " differed 
from almost every one in England are obvi- 
ously absurd and unworkable for ordinary men 
and women in the actual world. But the 
deeper elements of her religion are the same 
as in the case of Dr. Hale, and they work out 
the same results. She believed implicitly in 
God's world and lived as if her faith were true. 
She obeyed her conscience, she dismissed fear, 
she made God's will her own; and she had 
peace, satisfaction, and gladness, though in the 
midst of what the world regarded as almost 



58 THE COMING RELIGION 

sordid and vulgar conditions and environment. 
This is what her son says of the manner of her 
death : " Even an atheist might admit that the 
overpowering miracle of grace was mightily 
efficient." 

Take now the picture of the good Bishop in 
Victor Hugo's " Les Miserables/' It is typi- 
cal of the highest experience of a considerable 
number of noble Roman Catholics. This man's 
serenity, his fearlessness, his beneficence, the 
sanity of his life, in no way depend upon his 
creed or his ritual. Beside him are a multitude 
repeating the same creed and practising the 
same rites, and yet they remain as mean, self- 
ish, cowardly men and women as if they had 
never heard of a gospel. What is the differ- 
ence between them and the sweet-natured 
Bishop? The difference consists in the fact 
that he believes himself to be a son of God 
and behaves accordingly, and the world an- 
swers to his trust in it; whereas the others 
never took their supposed belief in earnest 
and trusted it. There is an immense differ- 
ence between swimming and only talking about 
it, or even practising the motions out of the 
water. There is the same difference between 
the life of religion and merely talking about it. 

A recent periodical told the story of a brave 



THE PROOF OF OUR RELIGION 59 

and honorable Chinese official, Kang Gu Wei/ 
who is an equally good illustration of our mean- 
ing. This Chinaman's religion was based on 
Confucianism, but he had read modern books 
and absorbed the best of the spirit of the uni- 
versal religion. The man's life was lived as if 
in God's world, and the consequences known 
as '' the fruits of the spirit " seemed to corre- 
spond. There was faith, hope, patriotism, 
humanity, fearlessness. What else does a man 
desire for the fulfillment of his nature? 

These are not exceptional cases: the more 
one looks for them, the more numerous they 
appear. They are very common in private life. 
Instances are to be found in every village. 
The tradition of them goes back into remote 
times. Socrates and Plato were close to the 
secret of the good life. The noble Stoics were 
trying the same experiment. Read a page of 
Marcus Aurelius and doubt if you can that he 
knew the substance of what we are speaking 
about. The best of the Hebrew psalmists and' 
prophets were familiar with the same facts. 
Religion is valid, as food is valid, because it 
supports life. Even a crude kind of religion, 
like a coarse food, is better than none. But it 
is always the food itself, and not the form in 

^ The Hibbert Journal, October, 1908. 



60 THE COMING RELIGION 

which it is served, that renews the higher life 
of man. 

It follows that the life of religion is not even 
dependent upon the consciousness of any man 
that he possesses it. Consciousness doubtless 
adds fullness and zest to life. It is a pity that a 
creature should not be conscious that he is 
alive, and thus be glad of his life. But life 
may be latent or sleeping without any active 
consciousness. So many a man lives as if he 
were a citizen of God's world, just, obedient, 
friendly, generous, without fear, and also 
without consciousness that there is anything 
religious in this kind of conduct. Some seem 
born to live so ; they are " natural Chris- 
tians '' ; some have learned through the costly 
discipline of life to take this attitude. Such 
a person is sometimes supposed by his neigh- 
bors, and even supposed by himself, to be an 
infidel, because he bears no conventional marks 
of piety and professes no creed. But what if 
he practises the noblest of creeds! What if 
he has found out what the ancient prophet 
Micah summed up under the great threefold 
rule: Justice, Mercy, Modesty! 

In other words, whoever is living in justice, 
kindliness, and modesty has caught the secret 
and motion of the universe. And this is so. 



THE PROOF OF OUR RELIGION 61 

whether he is aware of the fact or not. The 
universe answers to the experiment of this kind 
of Hfe: the man's consciousness of the fact 
only makes it more impressive, intelHgible, and 
imperative. Let us venture then distinctly to 
say that we believe that this is God's world, 
first, because this is the most adequate and 
rational thought of it, but mostly because we 
find that, whenever we treat it as such, it be- 
haves as if a life or spirit of goodness were at 
its heart. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 

We shall not need at first in this chapter to 
premise or assume any religious prepossessions 
whatever. Our proposition is that the greatest, 
most irresistible, and most practically useful of 
all forces that we know is good will. Perhaps 
we shall sometime discover that force itself 
is only a form or manifestation of will. But we 
know that will is higher than bare force and 
is able to use and direct it. Already the will of 
man, small as man's body is, harnesses every 
power of nature and makes it drive his wheels, 
light his towns, and carry his messages. And 
what is man himself, we wonder, except as 
some mysterious, intelligent, and directing will 
possesses him and shines through him? For 
it is certain that he does not evolve or create 
his own power, or even his desires, or deter- 
mine his destiny. 

See what will also does, though only in a 
man, to defy mere power and rise superior to 
it. The power of the tyrant, his armies, his 



THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 63 

shackles, his dungeons, his tortures, his 
threats of death; the power of the storm rag- 
ing over the unprotected heads of helpless sea- 
men; the power of the lightning or blazing 
mountain before the face of a lonely man; the 
power of cruel majorities commanding in vain 
the obedience of a resolute conscience; in all 
times the will of the few or the one, of Elijah, 
of Jesus, of Huss, of Columbus, of the exiled 
Pilgrims, of Livingstone, has lifted itself un- 
disturbed and invincible above all forms of 
violence. 

We said a good will. For this is the whole 
of a man at his best, while an ill will, however 
tempestuous, is only a part of a man. In other 
words, any man acting at the height of his 
being, as a good will, just, friendly, generous, 
social, putting forth his powers for a truth or a 
principle, marching to do a service, is stronger, 
more effective, more irresistible than the same 
man acting at the bidding of the brute in him, 
his passions or his egotism. In one case the 
man drives the team of all the creature pas- 
sions within him, whereas in the other case 
the creatures run away with the man. This is 
common human experience ; every one has tried 
it on occasion. The man is most truly a man 
in the attitude of good will ; and he is at his 



64 THE COMING RELIGION 

best for every kind of successful effort when 
his good will, ruling every impulse and appe- 
tite, compels the whole menagerie of animal 
forces in him to do the work of his manhood 

I prefer to use the expression of good will 
rather than love. I want to emphasize what 
the word love does not always convey, the virile 
quality, purpose, determination, energy. I 
mean something higher than feeling or emo- 
tion, or a good heart. Will is the driving 
power in a man. Feelings come and go; they 
delude us; nothing comes of them; possible 
reaction follows them and leaves us even worse 
than we were before. The good will moves on 
its way, with feeling or without it. It can be 
turned on in the darkest night, as if by the 
motion of the man's hand directing the search- 
light. Feeling follows the will, and rises out 
of its use, like heat out of motion. Acts fol- 
low the will and noble conduct develops from it. 
The good will, exercised again and again, be- 
comes the law and the joy of the life. 

See now the supreme law that binds human 
society together. Use a good will at all times 
and toward every one. You cannot always feel 
love toward every one, to the unwashed tramp 
who has told you a falsehood, to the boys who 
have trampled down your flower beds, to the 



THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 65 

'drunken neighbor who has beaten his child. 
But you can turn on and show a determined 
good will to every one of these unfortunate 
people. You can do your best for them, what- 
ever that " best " may be. You can resolve to 
give them help rather than punishment. You 
can do better than to forgive your enemies. 
You can resolve never to have any enemies. 
However others treat you, you will never an- 
swer back with hate or ill will. We shall pres- 
ently see whether this is not practical, and in- 
deed that no other course is practical. We 
shall see that it is surely not always easy, but 
perfectly feasible, and neither so difficult or 
so costly as the alternative courses of hurtful- 
ness are. 

Let us turn here, however, for a moment 
and relate what we are saying into its place 
in the magnificent conception of the life of man 
as a child of God in God's world. We have so 
far spoken of good will as of any other force, 
electricity or heat. We have only ventured to 
hint what its nature might be in saying that 
man does not create will, but only expresses it 
through himself. We cheerfully concede that 
man can use the mighty power of the good will, 
without being in any degree consciously reli- 
gious in its use, as he can use the water to 

5 



66 THE COMING RELIGION 

irrigate his fields without praying or thanking 
God for it. The main thing, indeed, with the 
good will, as with the water, is that men should 
turn it on and apply it. 

Nevertheless, the question comes: Where is 
the source of will? It is confessedly the cen- 
tral, most personal, and most spiritual of 
powers. We cannot think of it as evil or as 
indifferent. It dwells with intelligence and 
never is seen except under some form of in- 
telligence. An evil will is partial, weak, or 
short-sighted. A good will alone is intelligent, 
as a thoroughly intelligent will must be good. 
In other words, as we cannot conceive a truly 
mature and all round man to will evil, so we 
cannot conceive the infinite life of the universe 
to will evil. Here, as before, we guess the 
nature of the tree from the quality of the 
ripened fruit. 

What follows ? It follows that whenever we 
see a man acting in good will we see him act- 
ing as a son of God would act. To show forth 
good will is the nature of God, that is, of the 
spirit or life of the universe. It is the most 
personal, self-revealing, and characteristic of 
divine acts. To show good will is likewise the 
most characteristic act of the man. In this act 
he is at his height, as a personal and spiritual 



THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 67 

being. Whatever is of good will is of God. 
To believe in good will, to follow its lead, to 
do its deeds, to express its spirit, is religious. 
But all this is so, whether a man accepts our 
thought of it or not. He might remain an 
agnostic about it. The main thing is that he 
shall act the part of a man of good will. Must 
not everyone agree that there can be no higher 
or more practical rule of life ? " Whatever any 
one does or says, I must be emerald and keep 
my color." '' W^hatever any one does or says, 
I must be just, friendly, modest, helpful, that is, 
I must live as if I were a Son of God." We 
shall proceed to illustrate what this means in 
detail. 

First, every one must concede that good will 
is the binding law of every home or family 
group. It is not a home where selfishness or 
self-will is predominant. A home begins to be 
constituted as soon as and only when one or 
more of the group take the attitude of good 
will toward the others. Whoever enters the 
home as a guest and brings no good will re- 
mains a foreign element, like a grain of sand 
in a machine. The guest or the servant who 
can contribute good will is at once assimilated 
into the common life. The child born into the 
home tends to catch the ruling spirit as if 



68 THE COMING RELIGION 

through the atmosphere. The beginning of 
every deep morahty is here, since the Hfe of 
good will is the essence of happy social exist- 
ence. Add growing intelligence, and the satis- 
faction, the restfulness, the joy, and the effec- 
tiveness of the family group are raised to the 
height of their power. 

What is true of the family holds equally of 
every social group. Good will is the ruling 
power. Whatever member carries most good 
will, other things being equal, holds the balance 
of power or influence. As Jesus says, " He is 
the chief and greatest of all." This is to say, 
" Where love is there God is,'' in other words, 
the mightiest force in the universe is there. 
Every story of a great friendship bears this 
out. The little biography of Mrs. Alice Free- 
man Palmer is a good illustration to show how 
vast and persuasive a force a single woman 
may wield over a multitude of friends. 

Let us now make trial of our principle in 
the difficult and perplexing realm of business. 
Self-will, individual interest, the competitive 
struggle to overpass and even trample down 
others, they tell us, is business. The success- 
ful business man must be an egoist and not too 
scrupulous about the fate of his rivals. All this 
is indeed on the surface of business, as fitful 



THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 69 

storms play over the irresistible tides and vast 
currents of the sea. The fundamental nature 
of every legitimate business, however, consists 
in some form of human service. Let them take 
pains to teach this fact in the new Schools of 
Commerce! The manufacturer makes some- 
thing which meets a human need. Do you not 
suppose that he had better make it well than 
make it ill, the chair, the table, the coat, the 
bread ? Had he not better bring it conveniently 
within the means of the purchaser? Does he 
think it well to rob, and not rather to benefit 
and please the consumer? What would hap- 
pen to business if all manufacturers, with one 
consent and in sheer ill or selfish will, com- 
bined to injure the people? What would hap- 
pen, on the other hand, if they all tried their 
best, or even formed a trust, to provide excel- 
lent, honorable, economical, efficient service? 
Would anyone starve because he had turned 
out an admirable product of any kind of article 
which the world needs? 

We have a suggestive term : " The good 
will of a business." It does not mean the repu- 
tation that a manufacturer or merchant or 
banker has for his meanness, or for cheating 
his customers, or for disagreeable treatment 
toward them. It means exactly what it 



70 THE COMING RELIGION 

says, that through a series of years people 
have found this business house trustworthy, 
friendly, efficient, and generous. It points to 
the fact that customers like to deal with this 
house and are accustomed to tell their friends 
about it, — the most effective form of adver- 
tisement. This subtle and most spiritual of 
facts may be equivalent to a capital of many 
thousands of dollars. 

We deduce the practical proposition, that a 
man of determined good will to serve his cus- 
tomers to the best of his ability, and with uni- 
form courtesy and consideration, will prove the 
successful man in any decent kind of business. 
We do not say that he will succeed without 
training or intelligence, any more than a young 
artist will paint good pictures without training 
in art. What we say is that, as devotion to art 
is the main and essential requisite for making 
an artist, without which no artist can ever be 
great, so devotion to the service of mankind 
is the cardinal condition of success in building, 
manufacturing, buying and selling, and every 
kind of business. We do not say that success 
in business is always measured by the amount 
of money or profit that a man wins for him- 
self. Do you measure the success of an artist 
or a poet or a teacher or a physician by fees 



THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 71 

or salaries or royalties? We affirm, however, 
that the man of steady good will, other quali- 
ties and conditions being equal, is sure of hon- 
orable success. The world will not let such a 
man starve. 

We must recollect in this connection that all 
life is attended with risks. We all have our 
choice between noble and ignoble ventures. 
Does any one envy the professional gambler, or 
the burglar who happens to get off with his 
plunder ? 

Moreover, there is a steady pressure of the 
mighty social law, — the eternal good will 
urging the activities of man. Everywhere to- 
day business men are waking up to the fact that 
no enterprise is really private ; that no man can 
safely be trusted to do what he pleases with 
his own; that the single condition upon which 
he may draw his share of income from the 
wealth created by the labor of all the world, 
is some form of honorable and purposeful, 
neighborly or public service. No man may 
ever rightfully own a railroad all for himself, 
or run an electric plant, or mine coal and iron, 
or monopolize a water power, or build factories 
and tenement houses, or even plant corn and 
cotton. He must answer to society for all that 
he does, and must presently make it plain that 



72 THE COMING RELIGION 

his business does good and not harm, serves 
men and not robs them. Neither can any man 
long effect good and honorable service without 
a distinct and honorable intent to do this. 

We have found the solvent for all social 
problems. Not that it will work without an 
equipment of intelligence and expert knowl- 
edge of facts and conditions. Nevertheless, 
the essence of the solution of every vexing 
problem is at the heart of religion. It is the 
application of good will. We are constructing 
a new penology on this basis. For thousands 
of years mankind had treated its offenders with 
the methods of hate, arrogance, and revenge; 
it had segregated its criminals as denizens of 
a lower world ; it had multiplied punishments ; 
it had met evil with evil and murder with mur- 
der. It never made one soul the better; it 
went on creating and maintaining the condi- 
tions of crime; it provoked boys' and mens' 
obstinacy and antagonism. We still spend a 
preposterous percentage of our taxes on the 
support of jails and prisons! 

We are beginning to see the new law. The 
offender, the outlaw, the criminal is not the 
strong and dangerous person, the enemy of 
society. He is feeble, ignorant, ill born and 
unfortunately reared, the offspring of unwhole- 



THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 73 

some social conditions, for which we all are 
perhaps as much responsible as he is. He is 
the object of our pity more than our fear. He 
is what we each might have been, with our 
circumstances reversed. We hate him no 
longer; we forbear to do him evil. We will 
try to help him and cure him. If need be, we 
will give him costly hospital treatment and 
make him fit for worthy uses. At the worst we 
will take care of him as we care for the hope- 
less insane. This method works as nothing 
else ever can work. It is true that it challenges 
our humanity and our chivalry; for there are 
not yet enough trained men and women to 
carry it on. But we know our way at last. 
In the light of the new religion no permanent 
hell can be permitted in any corner of the uni- 
verse. Where the helpless and the sick are, 
there a resolute good will sets forth to lift up 
and save them. In this sense we preach the 
'' religion of redemption.'' 

We see the ugly faces of quarrelsome men 
ready to fight each other around the walls of a 
great factory. The employers and their work- 
men have an issue over wages or hours of 
labor. Perhaps the manager or superintend- 
ent has shown an arrogant temper as of one 
who is of higher caste than his Polish or Hun- 



74 THE COMING RELIGION 

garian workmen. Perhaps a scheming labor 
leader has precipitated trouble. However the 
trouble comes, only one way leads to permanent 
peace. The question at bottom is not one of 
outward organization or of more or less money. 
It is a question of humanity. Turn your good 
will on your men, you who ought to know bet- 
ter than they what forces move human hearts. 
Forbear, as you have intelligence, to treat your 
men as you would not treat your horse or your 
dog. Be patient, as you would wish others to 
be patient if you had to live on a dollar a day. 
This is no idle preaching. It is what scores 
of progressive men are learning to practice. 
Whoever tries it is on the way to success with 
his work. We do not say that it is a cheap 
solution of colossal labor troubles. The spirit 
of humanity is never cheap. But we say that 
anything less is unworkable, and that this in 
the end is certain to win. This is the new 
religion in action. 

There are those who prophesy the coming 
of Socialism, while others dimly fear it. Do 
we not all, however, so far as we are at all 
humane, wish the utmost betterment of social 
conditions? Perhaps no one can foresee pre- 
cisely what outward changes in our economic 
system are necessary to this end. Can we not 



THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 75 

agree, in the spirit of the larger religion which 
we are here discussing, that we will cheerfully 
take any step and adopt every desirable change 
as fast as we are shown that the welfare of 
man really requires it? Very well; there are 
plenty of obvious steps that we may immedi- 
ately begin to take together. Let what will 
come ! We will do right and not fear the con- 
sequences, least of all, fear the name of So- 
cialism. In fact. Socialism is an admirable 
name, if it means the embodiment of the no- 
blest Social Spirit. Otherwise, it is an idle 
name. 

Again, here is the tremendous problem of 
racial and international relations. Men of 
different colors confront each other with old- 
time suspicion, fear, contempt. Nations are 
rivals in trade and colonial expansion. Never 
did this problem involve more friction and peril 
to the peace of the world than to-day, when 
all peoples are being bound in new ties of inter- 
course and urged to enter into a new world- 
order of co-operation. We can already see the 
lines of the only possible solution of the mag- 
nificent problem. The barbarous methods of 
suspicion, isolation, and mutual hate from 
within tariff walls and fortifications are doomed 
to pass away. Both spiritual and economical 



76 THE COMING RELIGION 

forces are already at work to replace the cruel 
idea of the " exploitation " of the world for 
the sake of the few, by the new thought of the 
'' conservation '' of the resources of the world 
for the welfare of all. The " economic " inter- 
pretation of history henceforth takes a new 
departure. 

We are trying this idea on a small scale, as 
if in so many laboratories, in a hundred differ- 
ent communities in our own country. Wher- 
ever the method of the new religion of good will 
is tried with resolution, prejudice and hate give 
way. Negroes do not naturally hate white 
men ; there is no natural repulsion between the 
men of one race and those of another. Orien- 
tals are more like Europeans in their essential 
humanity than they are unlike in the superficial 
qualities that mark their differences. Meet the 
Negro or the Japanese or the Hindu or the 
Indian as a man, and he always understands 
this kind of language. He will give you as 
faithful service as you give him kindly respect. 
Thousands of employers and neighbors will tell 
you this from facts of their knowledge. The 
white man and the Zulu who show good will 
to each other are nearer together than two 
ministers of the same church who harbor 
jealousy in their hearts. 



THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL FORCES 77 

Take, finally, an even more familiar case of 
practical conduct. You are exceedingly busy 
some morning with work when an interruption 
comes. A child, or a stranger, or an applicant 
for employment asks your attention. This be- 
comes the next step in the day's work, as if you 
were a man under orders to give your indi- 
vidual mind to the new business, though it 
seems to be no business of yours. Will you be 
vexed and thrown off the track of your regular 
work? See now a remarkable fact. The in- 
terruption has no power in itself to hurt your 
work, unless, being vexed, you lose your good 
will. Keep your temper and you can resume 
your work as if nothing had happened. Are 
we not right in our proposition that good will 
in large things or small is the mightiest force 
in the world ? Does it not behave very much as 
if in using it we were putting the trolley of 
our little lives upon the current of a universal 
power ? 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE GOOD LIFE IS NATURAL 

The opinion has long prevailed in the world 
that the good life, and especially the life of re- 
ligion, is against the grain of human nature. 
This has been the burden of volumes of the 
teaching and preaching of churches, both Cath- 
olic and Protestant. Human nature, they tell 
us, is vile; it is natural to do wrong. You 
follow the line of least resistance in yielding to 
every kind of temptation. The natural man is 
selfish, mean, sensuous, quarrelsome, cruel. 
Plenty of proof texts can be cited from all the 
ancient scriptures for this pessimistic view of 
human nature. Of course plenty of facts seem 
to run the same way. 

The upright life, on the contrary, was said 
to be a species of miracle. Nothing is so hard 
and well-nigh impossible. It comes about, if 
at all, by the special grace of God. One person 
alone has ever succeeded in attaining it. But 
he was an exception, born out of the course of 
nature, a unique being, commissioned of God 
for a special mission. 



THE GOOD LIFE IS NATURAL 79 

A colossal scheme of theology has been built 
out of the notion of man's natural depravity 
and the exceptional holiness of the one Christ. 
It still holds sway in the world. We are still 
told that the good life even now is dependent 
in some mystical way upon the touch or knowl- 
edge or influence of the exceptional life of one 
perfect Son of God who lived nineteen hundred 
years ago ! Thus the momentum of a common 
and ancient habit of mind, long directed, more- 
over, in the interest of a powerful priesthood 
who held themselves to be the guardians of 
the means of connection with the single source 
of goodness, tends to persist, like a dying wind 
from a retreating storm. Thank God, we now 
at last feel everywhere the rising and whole- 
some breath of a new mode of thought. It 
is the idea of evolution or growth, spiritual as 
well as physical, with which the earlier view 
of human nature as intrinsically bad is totally 
incongruous ! 

There was another almost universal idea of 
religion in old times which identified it with 
certain abnormal states of mind and psychic 
conditions. To be religious was to be a magi- 
cian or a medicine man. It was to dream 
dreams, see visions, and hear voices. It was 
to be in touch with the denizens of a supernat- 



80 THE COMING RELIGION 

ural world, with whom you conversed in the 
mysterious state of trance. Mr. WilHam 
James' interesting book on " Religious Expe- 
rience '' probably conveys to most of his readers 
an impression of the religious life as abnormal 
and morbid. The healthy-minded religion is 
made to appear of inferior value as compared 
with the religion of half-insane medieval 
" saints.'' It is as if someone were to charac- 
terize the working of a locomotive by the fric- 
tion of its parts and the screeching of its 
whistle, whereas the best engine works freest 
of friction and ugly noises. The fact is, Mr. 
James has studied religion from the point of 
view of the physician, and has naturally exag- 
gerated the importance of its morbid symptoms. 
It has come to pass that a multitude of 
healthy people have conceived a prejudice 
against religion. A sane man desires to re- 
main sane and not to carry on strange, for- 
bidding, and ghost-like experiments over the 
dim border land of reality. If good and intelli- 
gent " spirits " want to talk with us, let them 
perfect their telephone lines to meet ours, and 
not compel us to be hypnotized, or to go into 
dark rooms and set up " cabinets " and detec- 
tive agencies. Religion belongs to the realm 
of light. We are shy of any religion that pro- 



THE GOOD LIFE IS NATURAL 81 

poses to play upon our fears and awaken buried 
superstitions, or threatens to make us over into 
beings other than we really are. The religion 
of nervous excitement, of forced revivals and 
sensational emotion, whatever incidental value 
it may ever have had, is now recognized as 
perilous to mind and body. What is more im- 
portant, it is at odds with good ethics, as no 
true religion can be. 

The new teaching is that religion is as 
healthy and normal as life itself. It is the 
growth, perfection, and fulfillment of life at its 
best. So far from running against the grain 
of nature, it goes with the grain. So far from 
being a function of priests or of visionaries, 
so far from being at its height in convents and 
hospitals, so far from being an object of dread 
to a sound and well boy or girl, it is what any 
healthy young person would like; it is at its 
culmination in strong men doing the work of 
the world and in gracious wives and mothers. 
It is no special function of any class or ex- 
clusive priesthood, but constitutes the upward 
movement of life in every one. Let us, indeed, 
never forget if we ever use the word holy, that 
its best meaning is whole, sound, well, sane. 
In this sense any healthy boy would wish to 
be holy. 



82 THE COMING RELIGION 

We do not, however, deny the facts that care- 
ful observers of the seamy side of Hfe have 
pointed out. Grant that it is natural for men 
to lie, to cheat and rob, to quarrel, fight, and 
kill; grant that selfishness and animalism are 
in human nature; and that the record of his- 
tory has been a very long and dreary tale of 
crime, war, trouble, and suffering. Grant 
even now that we live in a very uncivilized 
world, which only begins to develop the great 
human possibilities of religion. This is only 
to say that it is a world in the process of growth 
and that mankind has not yet come to his in- 
heritance. It is only to repeat the old prayer 
more earnestly, " Thy Kingdom Come." It 
does not follow that man is depraved, or that 
human nature is bad, or, least of all, that good- 
ness is not the normal life of man. It does not 
follow that man has ever turned his back on 
goodness, or " rebelled '' against a good God. 
The truth is, that man is only now coming to 
learn the nature of goodness and to conceive 
of a truly good God. 

We admit that it is natural to be selfish and 
to do the deeds of self-will. It is nature for a 
certain creature at a certain stage in its life to 
crawl on the ground, or under the ground as a 
worm, and it is equally the nature of the same 



THE GOOD LIFE IS NATURAL 83 

creature at a higher state of its development 
to fly, a gilded butterfly, in the air and sun- 
shine. It is the nature of an apple at first to 
be green, hard, and sour, while presently the 
same apple will be red and luscious. It is the 
nature of a little child to be selfish, but just as 
truly its nature is to become social. It is the 
nature of a child to be timid and anxious, but 
it is the higher nature of the same child, when 
grown up, to cast out fear and to live a life 
of confidence. It is in a boy to be noisy and 
self-willed, but later to grow tender, thought- 
ful, considerate, and chivalrous. It is nature 
to say, " I want my own will," and it is nature 
also to say, " I want nothing so much as that 
which is best," that is, " I want what is God's 
will." 

The old view of Paul is true to life : " When 
I was a child, I thought as a child, — when 
I became a man, I put away childish things." 
This is not because the man denies his child- 
hood, but because he expands toward maturity. 
It is therefore without irreverence toward the 
sentiment of Christendom, and with great sym- 
pathy, that we affirm a larger thing about 
Jesus' life than has been commonly said. We 
see no uniqueness in Jesus except the unique- 
ness of every real personality. We hold that 



84 THE COMING RELIGION 

Jesus' character was normal in all respects 
wherein men have admired it. He lived as 
a Son of God, but simply as all men may live 
as sons of God. It is the highest nature to do 
this. To say that he was just, true, loyal, 
friendly, faithful to death, reverent, hopeful, 
full of trust in God, is to say what we ought 
to be able to affirm, and do really affirm, of a 
host of men and women. Why should he not 
have been good and true? It is the best and 
most desirable life. Why should he not have 
chosen to do God's will? It is the happiest 
thing to do. 

The time has come to say these things 
plainly. It has been too common to discourage 
men from the good and normal life. They 
have been told that it was too difficult; the 
Golden Rule has been called impracticable; a 
great and hopeless division has been drawn 
between Jesus and all other men. He never 
drew such a line of cleavage. Boys and men 
have been expected to be selfish and sensual. 
This abusive treatment, by well known laws 
of pedagogy, has had its natural effect. Men 
tend to behave as their teachers expect. It is 
time to change the treatment. Let us begin 
to expect the best from men. Let us assume the 
good as normal, and who shall deny that men, 



THE GOOD LIFE IS NATURAL 85 

like plants, will respond to the natural effect of 
the air and the sunshine. 

We said it was normal for the fruit at a 
certain stage of growth to be acid and green. 
It is never normal, however, for the fruit to 
rot. When this happens, conditions need to be 
changed. So of the life of mankind. To be 
grown men and women, and yet at the same 
time to be greedy, arrogant, and jealous, to be 
oppressive, to be mean and unclean in life, this 
means that some disease or decay has got into 
the texture. Something needs to be changed. 
Perhaps the man has more money than is good 
for him, or too much self-indulgence and too 
little work. His selfishness, his pride, his ego- 
tism has begun to cut him off from the sources 
of life. You will cure him as you cure a dis- 
eased limb or plant. Restore his circulation, 
take him up into the sense of the larger social 
order to which he belongs, stir his good will, 
put responsibility upon him, and you may save 
him yet. There is need of " conversion " for 
all sophisticated and selfish people. 

We have seen that there is an eternal pres- 
sure toward the good life. Do you say that 
there is also a gravitation downward to moral 
decay? You are thinking of temptations and 
seductions that ensnare men and undermine 



86 THE COMING RELIGION 

character. We answer that the Hfe force is 
the mightiest of forces. It ever works to lift 
men up, as the cHmbing plant overcomes gravi- 
tation. You do wrong at your peril, you yield 
to greed and indulgence at the cost of pain and 
friction and hurt every time. " The wages of 
sin is death." In more positive terms, that cen- 
tral Power that makes for righteousness always 
works within you and in society to frustrate 
the evil and to demand and expect and finally 
to obtain the best. You cannot neglect the 
Golden Rule and do a profitable business, ex- 
cept in appearance and for a little while. Ever 
more distinctly the laws of trade are found to 
be the inexorable laws of service. Again and 
again the unscrupulous, the false, the cowards 
are bowled over and defeated. The only repu- 
tations that last are based in justice and good 
will. Not Napoleon but Washington holds his 
place in the high Hall of Fame. In each new 
generation the mighty lesson of the moral law 
reaches down closer to the common conscious- 
ness of mankind. Only the few knew it in the 
days of Nineveh and Babylon, but the multi- 
tudes are catching it today. Do you want the 
happy life? Do you desire fullness and ripe- 
ness? "Live as a child of God" is the only 
possible recipe. 



THE GOOD LIFE IS NATURAL 87 

One thing more on this point. We say the 
good life is normal and natural. But every- 
thing good in this world costs, else we should 
never know what is good. It doubtless costs 
to raise thirty or forty bushels of excellent 
wheat to the acre, as against seven or eight 
bushels of poor wheat from the same ground. 
It costs to raise the best apples with the appli- 
cation of the latest science of horticulture; it 
costs to build and run a ship of twenty thou- 
sand tons. It also costs to get the fruits of 
the spirit, love, joy, peace, courage, hope, and 
it costs to exercise a righteous will. We do 
not hold that the excellent things are cheap, 
but we say that they are worth all that they 
cost. If they are hard, it is harder to get on 
without them. In one sense they are easy, as 
everyone finds who has tried them; the work 
of winning them is more and more a delight. 
Whoever ventures the experiment of the life 
of religion or of good will presently seems 
to himself to be living in a manner that can 
only be accurately described as " the immortal 
life." For the life of God can be of no higher 
quality. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE KEY-NOTE OF LIFE 

Sin, sacrifice, renunciation, sorrow, the cross, 
have been the great characteristic words of the 
Christian rehgion. Their symboHsm is to be 
seen in every great church. We find traces of 
the same almost pessimistic ideas in the mighty 
reHgions of India. We afiirm now that the 
characteristic note of true rehgion is joy. We 
may say this without repudiating any truth 
that generations of m€n have held sacred. 

The ancient Christianity contained an even- 
tual promise of joy and victory. It mainly 
gave up this present world and made it a 
sphere of conflict and probable defeat; but it 
predicted another life where its saints would 
share eternal bliss. It bade men pray too for 
the coming of the kingdom of God on this 
earth, and therefore hinted that goodness 
would at last conquer here. You may even read 
between the lines, that the life of the noble 
prophets and heroes, and especially of Jesus 
and Paul and the early group of the men and 



THE KEY-NOTE OF LIFE 89 

women who lived in their spirit, was really no 
such continuous abnegation as most people 
suppose. On the contrary, no lives of kings 
or high priests or rich men in their generation 
contained more satisfaction, peace, and happi- 
ness than theirs. If they suffered more than 
other men, they were nearer also to the sources 
of joy. In this respect early Christianity was 
not far away from the highest prophetic teach- 
ing of the most spiritual, social, and ethical 
form of the Hebrew religion. 

The parent religion, however, upon the 
whole, struck a healthier tone in this respect 
than its child. The martyrdom of Jesus, turned 
by Paul's ingenuity into a theological system of 
blood-redemption, emphasizing the idea of sin, 
gave a twist to the development of Christianity 
which it is unlikely that Jesus himself with his 
simple ethical teaching ever foresaw. Chris- 
tianity, moreover, arose to dominion in a half 
barbarous world, where for generations the 
chief business of the ruling class was to fight. 
The new religion naturally took a militant 
form to suit the thoughts and conditions of a 
turbulent and cruel age. It incorporated prev- 
alent superstitions and fragments of oriental 
philosophies. Evil and good seemed pitted 
against each other with the issue clouded in 



90 THE COMING RELIGION 

doubt. Inasmuch as the common lot of the 
poor man involved continual oppression and 
misery, incidental to aristocratic and despotic 
government, the wretched and unfortunate 
found their comfort in looking forward to the 
rewards of a future life. The price of reform 
of time-honored abuses, political, economical, 
and ecclesiastical, in the face of arrogant pos- 
sessors of power, in a period of ignorance and 
inhumanity, was persecution and death. No 
wonder that men thought of the good as play- 
ing the game of life against the loaded dice of 
an unseen and satanic adversary. 

Into a world slowly emerging out of medi- 
eval barbarism, into a society evolved out of 
struggle and war, in the teeth of an almost 
dualistic form of the hereditary religion, the 
inner essence of which had hardly been appre- 
hended at all except by a few rare souls, the 
scientific idea of evolution was precipitated like 
a gleam of light in a dark cellar. It came at 
first as a disturbance to eyes accustomed to 
the darkness. It meant an awakening of the 
mind and a readjustment of all the furniture 
of human thought. It actually frightened the 
believers in the customary religion, as if their 
faith were doomed. 

The new teaching proclaimed that this is a 



THE KEY-NOTE OF LIFE 91 

world that moves by the processes of orderly 
growth. Man, so far from having been cre- 
ated holy, was seen to be on the way up from 
a state of childhood. Maturity, civilization, 
a happy and enlightened society are now before 
him. The phenomena of discord and struggle 
are the marks of the costly effort through which 
everything worthy and perfect is obtained. 
Different eras succeed each other in the course 
of nature. The era of strife and tribahsm is 
but one of them. The era of mutuality, co- 
operation, and international peace is as natural 
and as sure to come as the era of conflict and 
hate is sure to be outgrown. 

The process of change, marked everywhere 
else, is seen in the growth of religions, by natu- 
ral development from the crude forms through 
which the childish mind gropes its way, to the 
rational idea of an orderly universe. Never 
does any form of historic religion stand still. 
Nowhere is any forin of Christianity, for ex- 
ample, found to be the final and completed 
mode of faith. It is everywhere seen to be 
changing, as men's minds change who profess 
it, as their intelligence and especially their 
humanity grows. Witness the struggle of 
the Modernists today inside the Roman 
Church ! 



92 THE COMING RELIGION 

The idea of evolution, won through the labor 
of science, now becomes our clue wherewith, 
as we better understand the world, we come 
also to know better the nature and the use 
of religion. It actually contributes a helpful 
interpretation to certain elements of Chris- 
tianity which, at the first approach of science, 
appeared somewhat incongruous and imassimi- 
lable. This is what we should expect. For 
science, that is, knowledge, could never be 
hostile to the needs of man's higher nature; 
this would be to distrust the fundamental 
unity of life. We have now to show this beau- 
tiful unity in a new and reasonable form of 
faith. 

We have said that the early Christians con- 
ceived themselves to be living in a world of 
conflicting powers. Evil was even more real 
to them than good. Slavery, oppression, and 
wanton luxury and vice cast heavy shadows. 
The ideal life was that of the soldier. The 
noblest soldier was he who suffered the worst 
ills and died the hardest death. The ideal life 
was that which seemed to be defeated. For 
centuries men set before their eyes the example 
of '^ a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with 
grief,'' and they forgot that he also had his joys 
and compensations. " By the thorn path," men 



THE KEY-NOTE OF LIFE 93 

said, " and no other " was the way of glory 
everlasting. All this appeals to our chivalry. 
In this spirit men courted martyrdom. We 
never wish to be free of the appeal to our chiv- 
alry and our devotion. 

Nevertheless, the old mode of appeal no 
longer rings true. The reason, which really 
always longs to say Yes to the heroic emotion, 
demands now another mode of command. We 
cannot truly conceive of the universe any longer 
in the terms of dualism, or of life as a fight 
with an evil force. The figure with which we 
interpret life changes. We are not properly 
fighters and soldiers; we do not stand, a few 
true men on God's side ranged against the 
mighty hosts of Satan, the rebels and enemies 
of righteousness. We do not believe that there 
is any devil in the universe ; we do not believe 
that injustice is a real power. As lovers of 
truth we cannot fear error, for it is impotent. 
Truth is bound to win; goodness is strong. 
We have shown that the mightiest force in the 
world is good will. Most men, therefore, faulty 
as they are, like children, are not enemies of 
goodness, but susceptible to the persuasions of 
the victorious good will. The key-note of a 
world ruled by good will must therefore be 
joy. Too much evidence of this has accumu- 



94 THE COMING RELIGION 

lated to allow us to doubt it. Gladness and 
confidence now replace the idea of conflict 
and defeat. This change of the key-note 
of religion requires treatment in another 
chapter. 



CHAPTER X 

THE WORLD OF THE BUILDERS 

The old idea of the world was an arena of con- 
flict. Life was a fight. The new idea of the 
world makes it a marvelous work of construc- 
tion. Vast processes of building are going on. 
This means that we men, ceasing to be fighters, 
divided against each other, killing one another, 
now become builders, architects, engineers, 
constructors, poets, that is, makers and doers 
of good. In a real sense we are co-workers 
with God. We are building up the temple of 
justice, " the city of light." Translated into 
secular terms, we have before us the construc- 
tive work of civilizing the world. What the 
few hardly could see in the old days now comes 
to consciousness for all men. It is no longer a 
little band of aristocrats to whom the work is 
committed, as if the few were empowered to 
rule over and exploit the many! Our work is 
the work of mankind ; all races and colors and 
tongues are its destined instruments. All are 
about it, whether they know it or not ; they can- 
not resist, if they would, the sway of the uni- 



96 THE COMING RELIGION 

versal forces that move all for good. Our gos- 
pel to all men is to take up the work as willing 
and gladsome co-operators, partners, and citi- 
zens. We cry to our brothers : Live no longer 
as slaves or mercenaries, but rather as volun- 
teers and freemen. 

See now what the life of the free builder or 
engineer is. It is not to fight and thwart other 
men; it is to do something more intellectual; 
it is to overcome material obstacles, to apply 
forces, to lift weights, to circumvent rivers and 
mountains ; it is a work of constant and intelli- 
gent adjustment to nature and to the needs of 
man; it is to reach actual results for the en- 
richment of man. Every man who does a 
legitimate work in human society is such a 
builder, and the world is richer or happier, 
wiser or better, for his effort. 

There is, however, a side of the engineer's 
life that necessitates strenuous effort, cost, pa- 
tience, suffering, and sometimes death. It is 
incidental to all life; there is everywhere an 
element of venture and risk. The explorer, the 
sailor, the life-saver, the driver of the fast 
express, the bricklayer on the top of the wall, 
the pioneer in the wilderness, the physician, 
the mother with the new-born child, a host of 
people, great and small, in ten thousand emer- 



THE WORLD OF THE BUILDERS 97 

gencies must always be ready both to live and 
to die. Life costs, and death is incidental to 
life. There is the same element of risk with the 
scholar or investigator in telling the truth, with 
the merchant in standing by his principles, with 
the mayor or legislator in his devotion to public 
duty. Here is the short answer to those who 
think that the world must continue to have 
war for the sake of discipline in hardihood and 
heroism. There is likely to be indefinite de- 
mand for strong and brave men, and especially 
for sturdy moral courage. 

Sacrifice is not a form of loss ; it is a species 
of exchange and of eventual gain. You give a 
lower thing, your toil, for a greater value, the 
new block raised to its place in the wall. You 
give your money gladly for what is better, your 
education. The nurse gives nights of service 
in the hospital that sick people may recover. 
No man is worth living who, when the clear 
call comes for a duty or truth or love, will 
not go, as the race horse goes, with all his 
might, as, in Browning's story, '^ How they 
brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," 
the gallant creature at last falls in his tracks. 

All that was ever in the chivalry of a soldier 
or martyr is here. The young Dr. Lazear vol- 
unteering to expose himself to the bite of the 

7 



98 THE COMING RELIGION 

fatal mosquito for the yellow-fever experi- 
ments in Havana equals any soldier at the 
cannon's mouth. Lincoln dying at the hand of 
a mad assassin, was the true martyr rather than 
the fanatical Christians who threw themselves 
before Roman spears. Nevertheless, in all this 
kind of expense, the effort does not consist in 
the willingness to die ; it is essentially a will to 
live, and to do the uttermost service in living, 
and only to die if one must. The ideal hero of 
our new faith is not the man who dies, or be- 
cause he dies. He is the man who, whenever 
the end comes, has done his part, has achieved 
most, has laid the largest blocks of positive con- 
struction for the temple of God. Charles Dar- 
win never fought men, and had no enemies; 
his heroism was in compelling an aching body 
for years to do its service for the sake of truth. 
Carl Schurz cheerfully took unpopular risks for 
the love of his adopted country until a good 
old age, and thus proved himself the real hero 
even more than when he led soldiers in the 
Civil War. " I never sacrificed anything in 
my life," said the noble General Armstrong, 
founder of the Hampton School for negroes. 
In other words, he loved his work. 

We have yet to carry the truth of this teach- 
ing into all our schemes of education. Men 



THE WORLD OF THE BUILDERS 99 

used to scare the youth away from the good 
life. No healthy mind takes kindly to the idea 
of a world of sorrow and defeat. It was only 
in morbid youth or in hours of moodiness and 
depression that men and women gave them- 
selves to the regime of the convent. Youth 
desires true Hellenic fullness of life, the play 
of energy, noble and constructive ventures. 
Youth indeed loves still, perhaps too well, to 
fight, but it is more than satisfied, whenever you 
give it a task harder and more intelligent and 
eventful, like Dr. GrenfelFs work in Labrador. 
We offer youth exactly the career that com- 
bines in a splendid unity the quest for adven- 
ture, the love of overcoming evil, chivalrous 
daring and desire to accomplish notable ends. 
All this he may have who wills to redeem the 
trampled fields of the world from their ancient 
burdens of tyranny, war, greed, and selfishness, 
and bring to pass a new and just civilization, 
a co-operative commonwealth for all mankind. 
It is harder to overcome evil with good than 
to fight men in battle, but it is the only effective 
way to get rid of evil. Overcome ignorance 
with enlightenment, error with truth, injustice 
with indomitable honesty, selfishness with dis- 
interestedness and humanity. It is almost a 
new mode of education to teach this. 



100 THE COMING RELIGION 

This is distinctly to say that the life which 
intelligent men purpose to lead must be helpful 
and happy. But you say, How can a good man 
have gladness in the presence of the wretched 
ignorance of the world? He can be glad, as 
the good teacher is glad that his pupils are on 
the way to learn, and that he has worthy les- 
sons to teach them. How can he be happy, you 
urge again, where so many are sick and suffer ? 
He can be happy, as the good doctor is, even 
though his heart is full of sympathy, in the 
faith that his patients will mostly recover, that 
he has means to help them, that if death comes 
(as he expects it to come at last to himself) it 
need bring no terror. He is happy, too, be- 
cause most people are not sick, but well. He 
must be glad because, for the sake of the suffer- 
ing, the hospital work demands courage, cheer- 
fulness, and hope. 

But you still urge. How can a good man be 
happy, who sees all the injustice and cruelty in 
the world? He can be happy in the faith that 
evil is the part but not the whole, the excep- 
tion but not the law, the process but not the 
fulfillment. He can be happy, because evil is 
bound to be overcome, and because no man 
need ever yield to it so as to become mean and 
selfish. He can be happy even in the face of 



THE WORLD OF THE BUILDERS 101 

injustice as long as he is doing the deeds of 
justice himself. 

There are side by side in the city two colossal 
chimneys. One belches forth clouds of smoke 
and sullies every clean thing around it with 
soot. You do not judge the power that the 
engines develop by the mass of smoke dis- 
charged from the chimney. The other chimney 
shows no smoke at all. Every atom of coal is 
consumed and turned into power. It is the 
work of intelligent stoking as against igno- 
rance or negligence. 

So of the lives of men. One man turns the 
resources of his life, his mingled experiences 
of toil and sorrow, or even of 'pleasure and 
success, into a cloud of visible distress and 
complaint. Another, catching the secret of 
life, takes the same volume of trouble, suffer- 
ing, disappointment, and loss, and passing it 
through the hot crucible, transmutes the whole 
mass of his life into flame and power and light. 
Who does not know men and women who have 
performed this seeming miracle ? How can we 
help believing in the reality of religion, when 
we have actually seen sorrow turned over into 
the substance of life, into joy, beauty, and 
unity ! 

One thing more deserves mention. It used 



102 THE COMING RELIGION 

to be said that the central fact of Christianity 
was a doctrine of atonement. One perfect man 
had so suffered that in some mysterious way 
all men might be redeemed from suffering and 
changed from sinners into saints. We have 
been aware that something was amiss with this 
doctrine. Victims and martyrs and patriots 
have gone on suffering for hundreds of years. 
The bad have not often been changed into good 
men ; and the church has not learned very well 
how to alter men's character. This is still a 
very uncivilized world, and the need of " re- 
demption '' or '' salvation " (or, shall we not 
say real civiHzation?) is as great as ever. 

Yet there was a precious kernel of meaning 
in the old dogma about " the atonement." It 
is a profound fact, indeed a general law, that 
the suffering of the innocent, and especially of 
the noble and unselfish, has a moral effect on 
those who witness it, and tends somehow to 
become an irresistible force to bring about 
good. This is the spiritual cost of the world, 
akin to the cost that levels hills, bridges rivers, 
and founds cities. This kind of cost moves 
and changes the souls of men and works 
the perpetual miracle of transmuting evil to 
good. The Almighty is in and behind it. It 
is not in human nature to stand by and see inno- 



THE WORLD OF THE BUILDERS 103 

cent children, good women, noble men made 
to suffer, and not to feel pity or be stirred to do 
something, if possible, to stop the suffering. 
The suffering of the world, from barbarism 
and cruelty, from war and injustice, from pre- 
ventable fever, from dismal ignorance, is seen 
now to be a constant spur urging us through 
our sympathy to build better, to drain marshes, 
to stamp out disease, to banish slums, to forbid 
systems of slavery and outrage, to put protec- 
tive devices in our mills, to redeem the inno- 
cent and make all life clean and sweet. 

In this sense it was true that, when Jesus 
was lifted up on the cross, he drew the eyes of 
the world toward him, and the hearts of the 
world too. For what end? To the end that 
every one who feels our common humanity 
shall highly resolve to let no injustice, untruth, 
or neglect of his ever weigh down the lives of 
his fellows: "We will join hands to lift and 
save men.^' Every similar sight of human dis- 
tress is a challenge to all that is good in us. 
Do you suppose it is of any use to recite Jesus' 
name in a creed for the man who is misusing 
his workmen! 

Thus every human event plays its part in a 
unity. Nothing is wasted; no suffering is in 
vain. Every cry of a child swells the volume 



104 THE COMING RELIGION 

of the call on the great world to rise up and 
complete the work of a happy and civilized 
society. The moral force, once retributive, 
primitive, and divisive, now begins to run, like 
the modern medical science, not so much for the 
mere cure as for the prevention of evil. The 
cost, still heavy, now at last has intelligent and 
more effective direction toward every kind of 
reform. We have now the fulfillment and reali- 
zation of Paul's wonderful word, " All things 
work together for good." 



CHAPTER XI 

THE RULE OF " THOROUGH " 

The failure of religion with many who have 
made a slight trial of it is like the failure of the 
early electrical lights. They were not quite 
good enough. " We have looked into reli- 
gion/' men say; "we know about it; we are 
familiar with its creeds and ritual. We have 
attended Sunday school and church, but we see 
no special use in it. It may do well for other 
people, but it does not work with us." The 
truth is that most people have merely played 
with religion on Sunday or looked it over from 
the outside, without ever making a thorough 
trial of it for as much as a week. Here is the 
greatest thing in the world, if it is anything at 
all; it will carry you further and more effect- 
ively than anything else; and yet men dismiss 
it as impracticable on a mere superficial ac- 
quaintance with a cheap or inferior specimen 
of it. 

The churches have largely been at fault (if 
anyone was really at fault in a barbarous age). 



106 THE COMING RELIGION 

for a generally unsatisfactory impression of 
religion. They have advertised forms of reli- 
gion that were mere makeshifts, awkward, 
cumbrous, and uncomfortable. They have 
often fairly confessed that their invention was 
not intended for farmers, or merchants, or ac- 
tive business men, but rather for recluses, for 
invalids, and the aged. They have as good as 
told men that the time was not ripe for any gen- 
eral use of religion; this would come about in 
heaven or in the millennium, but was not now. 
Who, they have said, could really live in this 
present world and keep the Golden Rule of re- 
ligion? Its own teachers have represented it 
as only an ideal, not an actual scheme of life. 
Jesus, it was true, had tried his own religion, 
but see what happened! In less than three 
years he had come to a violent death. This was 
the nature of religion, if you really used it. It 
meant an impossible degree of patience and dis- 
cipline ; it meant ridicule and persecution. All 
that you could safely do about religion, then, 
for the present was to pay your respects to its 
ideals and its ministers and its occasional exhi- 
bitions, and agree to try it as soon as all other 
men were ready to adopt it also. The churches 
have set up an elegant system of schools upon 
" the theory of swimming," with a general 



THE RULE OF "THOROUGH" 107 

warning everywhere posted against venturing 
into the water ! 

The fact is that religion, in the sense in which 
we use the word, is practical or it is nothing. 
It is a rule or way of life, here and now. It is 
at least as good for farmers and fishermen and 
men of business and housekeepers and eager 
youth as it is good for the aged. If its golden 
rule is worth while in heaven or in another life, 
it must be because it is the universal law of 
social existence. If the art of the good reli- 
gion, like the art of swimming, would ever be 
good for all men, it is because it is good imme- 
diately for the first man who learns to apply 
it. All this depends, however, upon a pro- 
found and general law of human achievement, 
namely, that if you adopt any good rule or 
method at all, you must adopt it in earnest. 
It will work just so far as you are thorough 
and whole-hearted in trying to make it work. 

There is a very suggestive New Testament 
word, " Whatsoever you do, do it with your 
might.'' Put your will upon it. Concentrate 
your attention. This is the secret or law of 
success everywhere. This is what we say to 
the children, and we never deem it impractic- 
able for them. Have you a lesson to learn? 
Put all your mind on it, we say, and learn it, 



108 THE COMING RELIGION 

up to the mark of excellence. This is not half 
so hard as forever to fail in the lesson. It 
surely takes less time and nerve to do the 
thing well than to bear the friction, humilia- 
tion, and perpetual frustration of slovenliness. 
Try it and see. You win in the sports by the 
same rule. You must be all there, heart and 
soul and strength, as long as the game lasts. 

Now, the good religion needs to be used in 
the same way. We have defined it as an atti- 
tude toward all life, all work, and all men. It 
is the attitude of those who will to live as chil- 
dren of God, or, more definitely, with steady 
good will toward each other. We are bound to 
face and march one way, the way of the light 
and of our ideals. We are bound, even when 
it is dark as night, still to keep the way that 
leads toward day. We submit that this works 
splendidly, just so far as we actually trust it 
and do it. It works for the man who tries it 
alone by himself, as well as if ten thousand 
men were with him. The way goes on, the 
light appears, power needed comes to us, as if 
our trolley touched the live wire. 

The old religion was at fault on this point, 
in teaching that men could compound with 
God like bankrupt debtors. They could keep 
Sunday and have the rest of the time to them- 



THE RULE OF "THOROUGH" 109 

selves; they could pay tithes, and be able to 
keep the rest of their money to do what they 
pleased with. But we have a religion to offer 
which no one begins to understand who wishes 
to compromise with it. It says, " Thy will be 
done '' all the time. It says, All things are of 
God, that is, the means of service. If it is 
good on one day to live as citizens of the 
divine universe, it is good to live so all the 
days in the year. If God's will is a good will, 
why do we desire to do anything else? If we 
can earn part of our money by the means of 
justice and mutuality, so that everyone is better 
off for our work, why should we not earn all 
of our money the same way? In fact, we can- 
not really earn money in any other way; in 
any other way we should not be earning it, but 
robbing or hurting someone. You find it de- 
lightful to hold some of your money in trust 
for the sake of the family or for your fellows ; 
why may you not as well hold all that you 
have in trust to do the best that you can for 
everyone ? 

I take it this is the essence of the grand old 
text : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind, 
and all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thy- 
self.'' This spells out thoroughness, whole- 



110 THE COMING RELIGION 

heartedness, devotion, — what Professor Royce 
likes to call loyalty. It is the principle of life. 
It is not a matter of mere emotion so much as 
of will and intent. It is no blind law, but the 
use of the mind, the intelligence, the common 
sense is involved in it. It develops enthusiasm. 
He who follows it takes service in the order 
of the sons of God, the order of humanity and 
civilization. The man says, " Yes ! This must 
be what I am here for. I approve, I like the 
architect's plan; I will undertake it." He 
begins with a distinct movement of good will; 
the feeling of love will come fast enough after- 
wards; but it cannot be forced. 

The parable of the swimmer again suits our 
purpose here. It is of no use hearing lectures 
on the art of swimming, or dancing up and 
down on the edge of the water, or even taking 
half a dozen strokes on a single breath. You 
never would swim, if you swim as most Chris- 
tians practice their religion. The time comes, 
if you want to swim, when you must trust your- 
self to the water, and not think about anything 
else except to strike out and swim. You may 
be still timid ; you may not more than half like 
the exercise at first. But presently you have 
caught a delightful new motion; by and by 
you may swim as easily as you walk. 



( 



THE RULE OF "THOROUGH" 111 

Apply this fearlessly to the crux of the 
Golden Rule. You will keep the rule, you say, 
when others will keep it toward you. That is 
not the rule. It holds good for you, if no one 
else in the world saw it, and its joy comes, not 
when everyone else is keeping it, but when 
you stretch out your hands and trust yourself 
to go alone with it. No one knows what the 
good life is who has not taken on occasion the 
chilly venture of letting himself wholly go into 
the very depths of reality. Do you learn love 
otherwise? Is it love merely to wait to be 
caressed and comforted, and not rather to go 
out into the storm, if need be, to carry light 
and cheer; or, a harder task, to keep a steady 
temper when even your friends seem for a 
while to have turned cold ? 

They used to teach us to say " Thy will be 
done," but they also taught that the will of 
God meant the annihilation of selfhood and 
personality and the renunciation of a man's 
dearest desires. We understand the will of 
God, on the contrary, to mean the highest and 
best possible thing for each and for all, not re- 
nunciation but completion. To say " Thy will 
be done " is the setting forth of our noblest 
ideal of fullness of life. What do you desire, 
at your best, for your child or your best friend ? 



112 THE COMING RELIGION 

This is " God's will " for yourself as well as 
for the friend. What do you want for your 
city and your people? You want perfect 
justice and civilization. This is exactly 
what we mean when we say, " Thy will be 
done." 

There is, however, at times a sense of resig- 
nation in view of what the good will must be. 
This is because everyone must on occasion 
accept the common lot of men, and take his 
share of cost or sorrow or pain. And yet, when 
the worst seems to happen, we desire nothing 
different from that which has its place in the 
plan of an infinite good will. Thus we con- 
ceive that we never suffer alone. God is with 
us through it all. This is the meaning of the 
ancient faith, " As a father pitieth his children, 
so the Lord pitieth." 

A single line of demonstration runs through 
the growing list of splendid biographies of dis- 
coverers, inventors, investigators, statesmen, 
men of letters, educators, lovers of men, illus- 
trious women. These are our witnesses to 
show where success lies, namely, in disinterest- 
edness, whole-heartedness, loyalty, thorough- 
ness, in a good will, in the essence of religion. 
So far as they had this, they won character, 
freedom, friendship, gladness, lasting influ- 



THE RULE OF "THOROUGH" 113 

ence. No one ever really tried the life of 
good will and found it to fail. 

What a terrible and tyrannical conscience, 
someone says, you are setting over a man! 
On the contrary, the harsh and nagging con- 
science disappears when once we have enlisted 
'' for good and all." The case is like that of 
the young bride, swaying at first between hopes 
and fears. But when once the new life fairly 
begins, she was never so happy before. So, 
when a man fairly takes, the great religion in 
earnest, he presently discovers that he had 
never known before how good life could be. 
" How strange," such a man lately said, " that 
everyone does not see it ! " 

Let no one think that a man must be all the 
time aware of the working of his conscience. 
Like all the faculties, it tends to work best un- 
observed and almost as if by instinct. It is an 
organ of health, like one of the senses ; do not 
irritate it and it behaves well enough. In fact, 
the beauty of the religion of the good will is 
that it does not consist in a thousand and one 
rules and regulations. Jesus loved to teach 
this. The good life is a spirit or attitude, and 
you know at once when you have lost it. You 
know too when you have put up your trolley to 
the wire and the power flows again. The one 

8 



114 THE COMING RELIGION 

thing is to keep the good will, to turn it on and 
use it toward everyone with all due intelli- 
gence; this is delightful. It is like what it 
would be for a boy to be let into his father's 
shop and told to use the tools and the power 
as he saw his father use them, and to make 
perfect and beautiful things. 

The most perilous spiritual disease, next to 
selfishness, is conceit, pride, arrogance, ego- 
tism. It belongs on the side of the animal 
world, for we imagine in our childishness that 
we do things ourselves, that we deserve credit 
and praise and titles and compensation for our 
little achievements. We think we deserve 
at least part of the credit for what we do. 
The simple truth is that we deserve nothing at 
all; we only worry ourselves w^henever we 
struggle to get desert and credit. The world 
does better for us than to give us our dues. It 
is a world of good will or love. The power, the 
thought, the beauty, the patterns, the plan, the 
will itself, and the ideal all come from the 
fountain of being; we create or originate 
nothing. We receive, and we have the joy of 
sharing and passing on all that comes to us. 

We have nothing, therefore, to do with look- 
ing back on our work and pluming ourselves 
upon its excellence. The one thing is to go on 



THE RULE OF "THOROUGH" 115 

and 3o better work, and express larger and 
more effective good will. We may be glad in 
our work, we may enjoy every bit of beauty 
or goodness in it, but it is never ours to ap- 
propriate. It belongs, as we belong, to the 
Commonwealth, to the mighty universe of 
being. Our part is so to use it that happiness 
and welfare may abound. We are like the 
boy who plays on his school team. His suc- 
cess is his only that he may add to the win- 
ning power of the others. 

This view makes conceit and egotism ridic- 
ulous, and arrogance impossible. It is the only 
view that lets a man's soul rest in peace, free 
of envy or jealousy. We are never working 
for credit or pay. We are only doing the work 
of good will in a world that calls out more 
loudly for good will than for anything else. 
"It is required of a steward that he be found 
faithful.'' That is all. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE DEMOCRATIC GOSPEL, OR THE AVERAGE MAN 

We have promised to set forth a good religion 
or gospel for the people. We mean President 
Lincoln's plain average people, whom, he af- 
firmed, " God must have loved or He would 
not have made so many of us." There is much 
skepticism at present as to whether there is 
such a gospel. It has long been preached that 
there are only a few that will be saved. Not 
preachers alone have said this. It is in the 
current literature, in Bernard Shaw, for ex- 
ample. We must have a " superman," it is said, 
to supersede such poor creatures as men are 
now. Is not life a battle and a " survival of 
the fittest " ? You never then can expect more 
than a little of real excellence, like the rare gold 
or diamonds. Science seems to say something 
like this. 

Even the praise of famous men, exalting as 
it may be, often works to the discouragement 
of ordinary people. There was only one unique 
Christ, they tell us. No one else can come near 



THE DEMOCRATIC GOSPEL 117 

the stature of his Hfe. What is the use of all 
the millions of little and feeble lives in the 
presence of the kings of the race, the kings of 
art and poetry, the masters of wisdom and 
goodness ? 

Let us not be so fast in despising and dis- 
couraging the common people. The kings only- 
rise out of the common stock. The great art 
and music find appreciation among a host of 
common people. The best science indeed is 
busy in showing the world how to multiply and 
democratize the best things. Is the good wheat 
scarce? We have learned how to produce as 
much of it as man wants. Is the good fruit 
rare? We are bringing it now into every 
market. There is no man so poor in America 
as not to be able to read the Bibles of the world. 
Already a multitude of people, without the aid 
of a college education, are entering upon their 
spiritual heritage and are sharing the thought 
of the noblest leaders of the race. 

Who now are the " average '' or ordinary 
people ? Let us all for the purpose of this chap- 
ter count ourselves into this democratic body. 
Who among the millions of us expects to be en- 
rolled in the Hall of Fame ? Some of the blades 
of grass are a little taller or stouter, and some 
shorter and more slender, but we treat them 



118 THE COMING RELIGION 

alike; they have a common destiny, if only to 
feed higher life. 

It is a good practice of the wise trustee who 
marks his securities down to their par value. 
They may be worth more and yield an extra 
dividend, but whatever fluctuations occur in 
the market, so long as they keep up to par, the 
holder has no need to fear. So let us all hold 
our lives. We will rate them as so many ordi- 
nary lives, equal for aught we know to other 
lives around us. We will not reckon that it is 
more important for us than for other men 
whether we live or die; whatever is important 
for us is important also for others. 

We see at once certain wholesome compen- 
sations for " average people.'' In the first 
place, we have no undue and vexatious respon- 
sibilities for other people's affairs or for the 
welfare of the world'. It is not necessary for 
us to grasp after honors and titles, or try to 
take the higher seats. Let us come back into 
line with the fundamental, although often for- 
gotten, principle of democratic government, 
namely, that '' the office should seek the man 
and not the man the office." If our fellows 
want us, we will do our best to serve them, but 
we will not look upon office as a right, and we 
will resign it as soon as we cease to be useful. 



THE DEMOCRATIC GOSPEL 119 

Nothing is so dreadful as to hold a place that 
one does not fill! We will not care, as Jesus 
said, to be called " Rabbi " or Master. One 
recalls Plato's humorous story of Ulysses, who 
after having had his fill of princely ambition 
in this life, is rejoiced for his new incarnation 
to draw the lot of a private citizen. 

Again, as average men, we are relieved from 
the peril of special disappointment at meeting 
trouble or loss. Superior men and women 
might expect special privileges and exemption 
from trouble, or they might hope for favorit- 
ism. We average people merely look for the 
common lot of mankind. It is a mingled lot; 
there is sunshine in it, but not all sunshine. 
There are sorrows and hurts as well as joys; 
there are seeming injustices in the common lot. 
We expect this mixed life, and do not dream 
of running away from it to some exceptional 
climate; we do not purpose ever to pity our- 
selves for what men everywhere must bear, 
namely, the great common law of cost that 
underlies the universe. We suspect that we 
could not be fully men without it. 

It is suggestive that the noblest men and 
women, and specially the man whose life has 
been called the most typical human life, have 
all cheerfully taken the common lot, as if it 



120 THE COMING RELIGION 

belonged to them. It is certain that no man 
who cheerfully yielded himself to the common 
law was ever bowled over by disaster. The 
world herein behaves as veritably God's world, 
— not, you will observe, in that there is no 
dramatic or stern element in it, but that this 
element is made at last to do the marvelous bid- 
ding of beneficence. The tragedy of the world 
proves not to be defeat, but the march of the 
processes of the victorious goodness. 

We are ready now for a serious question. 
'Are you not making life too meek and unas- 
sertive, like a sort of oriental quietism ? Do you 
leave room for the eager play of youth, for 
Anglo-Saxon energy, for the joy of struggle 
and conquest? We answer this question by 
laying down the average man's rule of life. 
It is this: To do his best and make the most 
out of his average talent. He is not respon- 
sible for another man's best ; he does not have 
to live the impossible life of some historical 
personage, — an Isaiah, a Buddha, a Jesus, — 
or to accept the ideal that he finds in a book. 
He must only do his best with his own ordinary 
work. But this means to apply all the intelli- 
gence and conscience and energy or good will 
that he has. Need any full-blooded American 
complain of this stent? Here is the combina- 



THE DEMOCRATIC GOSPEL 121 

tion of the simple or quiet life with thorough 
activity, fullness of being, and the absence of 
worry. 

There is a man, for example, with a tiny 
farm of some twenty acres of ordinary land. 
But the man is doing his best with it. He has 
cleared his little grove of underbrush and insect 
pests; he has set out an excellent orchard, he 
has the best of gardens, his cottage is sur- 
rounded with vines and flowers. You remark 
on the place as you pass. The man is making 
a good living; no man needs more than such 
an average farm. Let him put his whole self 
into it and he is better off than the exceptional 
and wealthy neighbor, with hundreds of acres 
of land that he takes no trouble to till. 

It is well to stop long enough to see how large 
the assets of the average man are. Most people 
forget to take an account of stock. Indeed the 
man hardly exists who has only one talent. 
Thus, the ordinary man has as good senses as 
anyone wants; he hardly begins to use any 
one of his five senses, his sight, for example, 
up to the limit of its power and grow^th. See 
what Helen Keller was enabled to do with the 
development of the single sense of touch ! The 
ordinary man has also a fair measure of skill. 
Train any boy a little, and if he puts his will 



122 THE COMING RELIGION 

into the work, he can make a good carpenter 
or mason or machinist or tradesman. Many- 
average men or women have the gift of music 
and can learn to sing. 

The ordinary man has, moreover, certain 
fundamental and precious moral qualities, a 
sense of justice, a faculty of conscience, the 
perception of truth. A prominent white min- 
ister, addressing a body of negroes, told them 
that they inherited *' three great characteristics 
of their race, — reverence, loyalty, and pa- 
tience." What an equipment of power the 
speaker attributed to these average negroes! 
There is not an office or shop where loyalty and 
patience, with even a little skill, are not highly 
marketable commodities. The world cries out 
for millions of loyal and faithful workmen, 
black or white or brown. 

The average person also is just as likely as 
the poet or the philosopher to have the power 
of love. I mean the power to bestow love and 
make love shine out as from a candle. Thou- 
sands of humble wives and mothers carry this 
gift of love, and there is nothing that the world 
needs so much. Let any one bring this single 
faculty up to the height of its development, and 
he will make the darkest place light. The fact 
is, there is not so much difference between the 



THE DEMOCRATIC GOSPEL 123 

endowments of great and of average men as is 
often supposed. The difference is in the use 
of will, and especially of good will. Let all the 
little blades of wheat have water and sunshine, 
let them keep busy, living and growing, and 
there will be no great difference at the harvest 
between big and little. 

We have so far spoken as if it was well for 
everyone to think as modestly as possible of 
himself and keep his value marked down to 
par. This is true. A man has nothing to do 
with setting his own value; he is never in a 
position to estimate it rightly. But the time 
has come to say that, in another sense, a man 
cannot think of himself too highly! This is in 
the same sense in which he ought to think 
highly of other men. 

We need here to see clearly the relation of 
each man to the magnificent and divine universe- 
order to which, whether we know it or not, we 
all belong. We have already shown that the 
very essence of religion is that a man belongs 
to something greater than himself, that his 
work and life count and are significant, along 
with all other creatures, in a mighty upward 
movement of progress. No man belongs to 
himself ; he is held in the grip of the order and 
motion, like a planet. To know this and be glad 



124 THE COMING RELIGION 

in it is to be a free man. There is no other in- 
telHgible or practicable conception of the world'. 
We sometimes call it the idea of solidarity; it 
is the kernel of truth in every discussion of 
socialism; it is at the heart of the coming 
religion. 

Let us illustrate how this idea works to set 
a new and correct valuation for every man. 
There is a tiny grain of sand blown about on 
the beach. It seems to be only a bit in the 
realm of chaos. It has no obligation or respon- 
sibility, except to follow each stronger wind 
that whirls it. But one day the grain of sand 
is taken with other sand and made into cement 
and built into the wall of a great house. The 
sand has now and henceforth become a part 
of a structure ; it has an obligation to hold fast 
and keep the wall; it has become as pre- 
cious and necessary as every other part of the 
building. 

There is a bit of pigment in the soil so small 
that no one knows it is there ; it seems useless. 
Some day the rootlets of a plant take up this 
atom of pigment and straightway, in the subtle 
alchemy of nature, it goes into the tint of a 
rose. It belongs now to the texture and beauty 
of the rose and is responsible to keep its color. 

So with the life of the average man. He may 



THE DEMOCRATIC GOSPEL 125 

think himself of no account or use. He is alone, 
a possible " tramp " on the road. Careless of 
himself and irresponsible, a kicker against 
society, he may have contemplated throwing 
himself into the river. But some day the grip 
of duty or love catches him and takes him over 
into some form of the great social structure. 
He marries and has wife and children to care 
for; he takes service with a great railway 
and puts on its uniform; or volunteers in the 
life-saving service and patrols a stretch of wild 
coast; he joins a lodge or a church. Almost 
invariably something has now happened to the 
man, provided he takes the new bond in earnest 
and gives himself to it. He is beginning to 
live in a universe; he feels upon himself the 
great bonds of obligation that connect with the 
driving wheels of the world. He may no longer 
throw himself away; he must sell his life 
dearly for the sake of his children, his com- 
rades, or for unknown men wrecked on his 
shore. He is just an average man still, but 
where he stands alone in the dark as watch- 
man, where he marches, or moves his engine,: 
the whole family of man and the eternal powers 
that watch over man are concerned with him 
in the fulfillment of his trust; the guardian 
stars shine down their approval of him. There- 



126 THE COMING RELIGION 

fore we say, though a man may never think 
highly of himself as above other men, he cannot 
possibly think too highly of himself as bound 
up with all humanity in the structure of human 
society and mutual service. 

Men often think that the course of history 
depends on certain gifted heroes and leaders, 
the Washingtons, the Goethes, the Emersons, 
the Carlyles, the Tennysons. They miss the 
great poets and statesmen, and they cry that 
the life of the age is running out in decay. 
They see the ugly scum on the top of the social 
whirl of New York or London, or they visit the 
dreary tenement districts; they hear the old 
world cries of class and party war, and they 
turn pessimists about the progress of mankind. 
They forget that the life of the world in every 
age consists in the lives of a host of true- 
hearted, ordinary people whose names hardly 
ever appear in the newspapers. You will find 
them in every village. Such as these stood 
back of Washington and Lincoln and made 
their efforts possible. Such as these gave their 
hearts to the poets and helped them to sing. 
On these ordinary people, yet obeying the law 
of their being, as upon the vital corpuscles of 
the blood, the health of every land and age de- 
pends. The coming religion will make a new 



THE DEMOCRATIC GOSPEL 127 

3emand for the best work of the average man, 
and at the same time set the proper value 
upon it. 

We finally judge and value men, not by their 
size and stature, but by their quality and hu- 
manity. The Almighty Intelligence, we sur- 
mise, does not care for the bigness of His 
stars, does not value the great Kohinoor more 
than the tiniest diamond still hidden in the 
earth, does not care for the flower of a century 
plant more than He cares for the violet. So 
also we reverently think that any one of the 
uncounted, unthanked deeds of courage and 
mercy, gleaming out of humble places over the 
earth, may signify as real beauty and joy in 
His thought as the sight of Socrates drinking 
the hemlock or Jesus dying on the cross. 
Surely, where love is there is the beauty of 
God. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE " EXPERIENCE " OF RELIGION 

The knowledge or " experience " of religion 
is much nearer to people than they commonly 
suppose. The ordinary view of religion made 
it a mystery and exceptional. It was asso- 
ciated with peculiar signs and manifestations, 
with the play of powerful emotions of contri- 
tion and humiliation, with ecstasies and visions. 
The few and not the many were capable of 
these exercises. There was always danger 
that, being forced under provocation of excite- 
ment, they would ensue in a relapse of fatigue, 
melancholy, or indifference. These manifesta- 
tions lay indeed close to the physical or animal 
side of life. If religion consisted in such 
things, many of the noblest men and women 
must go without religion. Worst of all, the 
sensational form of religion, as in the case of 
the converts at a negro camp-meeting, might 
have no ethical or social value whatever. 

Let us pass over to a different and much 
more profound as well as universal order of 



THE "EXPERIENCE" OF RELIGION 129 

facts. In the first place, we all have knowledge 
or experience of the mystery of power. We 
use, direct, and control it, when we lift our 
arms, or when we steer a ship, or when we 
press an electric button. We do not under- 
stand what makes power in its various forms,, 
but we know how it behaves. We do not create 
it even in our own bodies. It is ever in and with 
and about us. More and more we come to learn 
its laws or habits and to trust it. We build 
and plant and travel and carry on the myriad 
works of civilization by its means. Say that it 
is the power of God or not; call it what we 
please or call it nothing. The universal fact we 
know. This is the constant energy of which 
Herbert Spencer said we were surer than of 
anything else, from which all visible things 
doubtless spring. 

This brings us to the deeper mystery of life 
and consciousness. We are its sharers and its 
children. It breathes in us and through us, 
as if it sprang out of the hidden sources of 
being. It lifts us at times to high levels of 
joy. We may think that we know much about 
it and its myriad forms, but we know nothing 
of how it comes about. We generally think it 
is good and not evil; most of us want more 
of it. Call it the divine life if you will, or 

9 






130 THE COMING RELIGION 

let it go unnamed. Yet we still know it and 
experience it, though we cannot define or ex- 
plain it. 

We share also in the mystery of thought 
or reason or intelligence. It radiates in the 
world like light and we follow its paths. It 
rises into majestic conceptions of a universe; 
it handles prodigious figures an'd builds up 
mathematical systems. It ever works toward 
order and unity. We do not so much seem to 
create our thoughts as to observe and record 
them, as if we were docile pupils, listening as 
well as we can to a Master-Worker, whom 
we only begin to understand. Call this uni- 
versal mind, gleaming out in the crystals, ut- 
tering itself in ants and bees, written in the 
motions of the stars, rising to its lofty flights of 
art and poetry in mighty geniuses, the thought 
or mind of God, the universal poet and thinker, 
or call it by no name. Yet we all share more or 
less in the knowledge of the fact; we experi- 
ence something of the mysterious intelligence. 
If we are open-minded toward it, the law is that 
more and more this intelligence flows into our 
minds. 

Moreover we live in a world of beauty. To 
say order and unity is to begin to spell beauty. 
To feel harmonies and symmetry, to know 



THE "EXPERIENCE" OF RELIGION 131 

rhythm and the everlasting motion of waves 
of h'ght, of sound, of electric motion, brings 
us close to the realm of beauty. To live most 
fully is to move in rhythm; to think most 
richly is to think upon the beautiful lines of 
order. There is something of this wherever 
we look, in the dances of bright butterflies, in 
the vast curving sweep of the flight of the 
birds, in the play of every species of fish in the 
sea, in the color and grace of flowers, in the 
rounded limbs of a little child, in the face of 
gracious womankind. There is that in the 
world which seems to rejoice in its work, and 
at our best we rejoice with it. Call it what 
you please, call it the Beauty of God, or let 
it go unnamed, nevertheless the universe pro- 
duces it and always urges us to open our eyes 
and believe in it. 

There is that in us which we all share, that 
we name conscience. Nothing is more won- 
derful and mysterious. It is not less but more 
wonderful in the fact that even the animals 
have at least some dim sense of it. It is a social 
and binding force in us, never letting us be 
content to do as we please, to do violence to 
our brothers, to be cruel to our neighbor, to 
rob and oppress. This universal urgency in us 
at times sets a single man in his integrity, like 



132 THE COMING RELIGION 

a rock, fearless in the face of a mob. It bids 
men and women go to the block, to the cross, 
to the grave, without fear of consequences. 
Obeyed, it fills a man with a sense of rest and 
peace. Refused, it leaves a man's soul restless 
and dejected; life and happiness seem to ebb 
out of him. 

We cannot think of this mighty urgency that 
rests upon us quite as we think of force. It 
is not indeed altogether easy to call force im- 
personal or material, but we cannot possibly 
call the power, that makes right, impersonal or 
material. It is in the same class with mind 
and beauty. It bears the mark by which we 
know persons and '' spirit," as contrasted with 
atoms and matter. We might be safe in call- 
ing this spiritual force in us, and through life 
everywhere, by the highest name, God. But 
here too, whatever we call it, or if we have no 
name for the mystery, we know the fact. We 
have all felt its mystic pressure, as if a voice 
spoke to us saying " Do this " or '' Avoid 
that." We all have experienced the rest and 
satisfaction that follows wherever we have 
obeyed this inner voice. If someone had called 
to us out of the depths, " It is well with you, 
my child," we should hardly have felt more at 
ease. Is not this the knowledge or experience 



THE "EXPERIENCE" OF RELIGION 133 

of religion? Is anything more profound or 
spiritual? Is anything more practical as well 
as delightful? Is an epileptic seizure or a 
state of hypnotism or a trance holy, and is 
not this sense of an obedient and satisfied 
conscience far more holy? 

There is another fact as impressive and 
spiritual as the experience of duty. It is good 
will or love. One of the greatest passages in 
the New Testament says that " Whosoever 
loveth is born of God and knoweth God.'' This 
does not mean the love of God, as apart from 
any other true love. It distinctly means such 
love as one man bestows on another, on his 
wife or child. The old writer says that we 
know the divine love in no other way except as 
we love one another. He teaches that all love 
is one. In other words, love is the most uni- 
versal and mysterious fact in the marvelous 
world. This is what we tried to show in an 
earlier chapter. You know nothing of the uni- 
verse unless you come to know its highest 
value, — good will or love. 

It seems here at last as if we could frankly 
call love by the highest and most spiritual term 
that we know and say, " God is love.'' But 
we will not insist that anyone give the great 
fact a name. It is enough to see that, on the 



134 THE COMING RELIGION 

most personal side of life, the world behaves 
and answers to us as if a living, loving person 
were at the heart of it. This is a matter of 
common observation and experience. In the 
hour of your true love, when your heart goes 
out in any word or deed of loving service, in 
every act of complete good will toward your 
own child or a stranger, when your whole self 
goes with the motion, you know, as at no other 
time, what full, personal life is. Nothing can 
hurt you in that hour. You are at the height 
of your being. Nothing can make you afraid. 
It is as if the Spirit of the universe were with 
you and you were at one with the whole. 

Now, no man creates this sense of oneness 
and perfect life. It is no more your own work 
than is a chemical reaction, when the elements 
of hydrogen and oxygen combine to form 
water. In both cases it is the infinite nature, 
or God, who does the work. You cannot reach 
the joy of love by any act of simulation, or by 
imagining it. You must be all there and hearty 
in your good will. On the other hand, however 
painful outward physical conditions may some- 
times be, nevertheless, whenever you give 
your best self in the act of love, the inward 
rest and peace hold good. We do not hesitate 
to say that this is the knowledge or experi- 



THE "EXPERIENCE" OF RELIGION 135 

ence of religion in its noblest form; everyone 
knows something of it. The difference between 
one man and another is that one makes this 
experience of religion the purpose of his life, 
while with the other it is the exceptional inci- 
dent, from which he falls away into more or 
less confirmed habits of indolence and neglect. 
Well for him who sees how great the experi- 
ence of true love is, and henceforth, having 
known it, makes it the rule of his life! 

" For life, with all it yields of joy and woe 
And hope and fear, . . . 

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love. 
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is; 
And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost 
Such prize despite the envy of the world, 
And, having gained truth, keep truth : that is all." 



CHAPTER Xiy 

ETHICAL MYSTICISM 

The world is in the process of learning a new 
form of mysticism. I venture to call it " ethi- 
cal mysticism/' if I may be allowed immediately 
to explain this difficult expression. I take it 
that the mystic is the man who is conscious of 
God. This word has been so badly abused in 
the direction of egotism and fanaticism as al- 
most to spoil its value. I merely use it in 
passing in order to emphasize a reality. If 
God is at all, it must be good and only good 
to be conscious of this reality. To be thus 
conscious is what religious people have called 
mysticism. But they have never associated 
this word with ethics, or conduct and char- 
acter. If there is any sense in it, however, 
mysticism, that is, the consciousness of reli- 
gion, must be ethical, and practically good for 
the welfare of society. 

We happen to have in an old Scotch writer 
the very definition of religion that we need to 
make our meaning clear, " Religion is the life 



ETHICAL MYSTICISM 137 

of God in the soul of man." Let us say that 
the Hfe of God is power, is consciousness and 
intelHgence, is beauty and joy, is righteousness 
and justice, is good will or love. These are 
all so many forms of the One Life from which 
we all spring. Suppose now that a man uses 
power, is instinct with intelligence, marches 
with every prompting of duty, stands like 
Wordsworth or Thoreau entranced with the 
gladness of nature, thrills with love and gives 
his will to the good will that binds the stars and 
orders the nations. Suppose he thus opens his 
heart and mind wide for the flow of the mani- 
fold life of the Universe: this is religion. 

Religion is threefold. It is a magnificent 
conception of a divine world-order to which we 
belong; it is the feeling, or emotion of trust, 
gladness, reverence, appropriate to the won- 
derful thought; it is the kind of conduct, 
obedient, generous, friendly, devoted, that fits 
both the noblest thought and the most exalted 
feeling. Religion then is, at its best, the life 
of God in man's soul, flowing forth to the ser- 
vice of man. This is what I mean by ethical 
mysticism. The good life is bound over, with 
all useful and social activities, as if by the belt 
that connects the wheels of a mill with the 
sources of power. 



138 THE COMING RELIGION 

We suspect the time is fast going by when 
anyone can have real spiritual experience of 
the presence or love of God except under ethi- 
cal conditions. The mysticism of the self- 
centred individual or egoist has had its day. 
The time properly comes in the life of a child 
when the parent desires something more than 
that the child shall merely desire to be petted 
and fondled, least of all to be treated as a 
favorite. Is the child ready to do its part with 
the other children in the work of the home or 
the farm? The most loving parent will be 
weary of the caresses of the selfish, lazy, and 
disobedient child. But men have thought that 
they could command delicious spiritual experi- 
ences, alone with God in closets and cloisters 
by fastings and prayers, apart from their fel- 
lows, exempt from the laws of a world of mu- 
tual toil and helpfulness! As soon expect 
running water in the house without making 
connection with the great main. The natural 
law of the spiritual circulation of the universe 
is that the peace of God will flow into the life 
of faithful and friendly men. But it cannot 
flow to the unfaithful and unfriendly. It is 
not merely a relation between the individual 
and God; it is social; it binds each man with 
all men. For failure to see this many are 



ETHICAL MYSTICISM 139 

skeptical of the reality of religion. Because 
it will not run in the shallow channels of their 
ill-will and self-will, they think that it does not 
exist. 

We have come to a simple understanding of 
the vexed question of " authority " in religion. 
Authority here is like authority everywhere 
else. There is no absolute or infallible author- 
ity for finite and fallible men. Authority, 
touching science or history, or any side of the 
vast universe, is always only approximate. It 
is enough if it serves for practical purposes. 
So with religious authority; no Bible unfolds 
the whole mystery of human existence. No 
word of any absolute teacher or pope solves 
our fresh problems of conduct. No authority 
can take the place of a man's intelligence or 
compel and overpower it. 

Authority is of the nature of light. In this 
sense there is plenty of authority for all that 
we need to know of religion, — I mean for its 
great central ideas and the axioms that under- 
lie life. I have tried to show that this kind of 
light is about us and within us. We see that 
truth is good and ought to be uttered; we see 
the nature of a duty and that we ought to do 
it ; we see the binding quality of love and that 
we disobey it at our peril. We see, when our 



140 THE COMING RELIGION 

light is the brightest, that this world behaves 
as a spiritual universe, where " no good thing 
is failure and no evil thing success." We 
all know at least a little of the spiritual facts 
of faith, hope, love. 

Is there, then, no special authority of any 
Messiah or prophet ? Yes and No ; as in every 
other department of life. Though no man of 
science can make us believe against the evi- 
dence of our senses or our reason, there are 
great leaders and teachers in science who see 
rnore than we see, who can set us at their 
point of view and show us things which their 
telescopes and microscopes have revealed. So 
there are great spiritual geniuses and teachers 
whose presence seems to carry light. They 
have experienced more deeply than most men, 
or have thought more clearly, or have lived on 
the heights. We listen gladly whenever they 
give us their veritable experiences. They help 
us most when they assure us of what we partly 
see now. There are only a few things on which 
these great teachers insist; they are the most 
common things. " What doth the Lord re- 
quire of thee, but to deal justly, to love mercy, 
and to walk humbly with thy God.'' 

The deepest facts of religious experience are 
essentially alike, under all variety of forms. 



ETHICAL MYSTICISM 141 

The Jew or the Confucian or the Christian has 
each the same testimony to the vahdity of duty 
and love. Someone tells us of his experience 
of the fellowship of Christ. Another describes 
the same kind of fact under the imagery of 
the thought and presence of an angel mother. 
Dr. Edward Everett Hale used to tell a story 
of a Japanese friend who in a storm at sea 
said he " was not frightened, for Buddha was 
with him and he was with Buddha." Do you 
say that this difference of language discredits 
all these stories as alike vain? We think just 
the opposite; namely, that each was a form of 
the experience of the encompassing life of 
God, in whom, in every act of essential trust, 
we rest secure. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE NEW THOUGHT OF PRAYER 

Certain important and interesting questions 
now arise. What is prayer? What is wor- 
ship? Is there any use or reaHty in prayer? 
Is there any true sense in which a rational 
man may have " communion with God " ? 
For in the past all these expressions have 
covered great sources of strength and comfort 
for men. 

It is clear that much which we have asso- 
ciated with prayer and worship is fast passing 
away. Indeed men have not commonly prayed 
at all, but they have only " said their prayers." 
They have thought of prayer as a sort of magic, 
through the recitation of which they might 
procure special favors. In the face of the 
broad fact which Jesus perceived, that God 
makes '^ His sun to shine on the evil and on the 
good, and His rain to fall on the just and 
the unjust," men have continued to offer up 
prayer for rain or for sunny weather, like the 
early "medicine men." We are coming to 



THE NEW THOUGHT OF PRAYER 143 

see that, so far as we are truly children of 
God, we do not wish to be treated as favorites. 
We will not ask for any special indulgence, 
even if we thought it possible to obtain, for 
example, that where our neighbor's ship must 
ride in a tempest, our ship sailing the same seas 
shall be exempt from storm. 

The fact is that we are happy and content 
to be citizens of an orderly universe, in which 
we can depend on its laws and trust in the 
steady working of its vast friendly forces. 
We like this better than to be subject to arbi- 
trary and special interpositions, in favor of 
some or in punishment of others. We approve 
of a world in which we can procure blessings 
by obeying the law of work and cost, and can 
procure nothing by crying out and cutting our- 
selves with knives, like priests of Baal. This 
is surely a more divine world than the intro- 
duction of any semblance of arbitrariness or 
willfulness would make it. 

We have shown that real religion is founded 
on facts. If prayer, then, is real, we shall dis- 
cover what it is from a study of the facts of 
our consciousness, the most real of all facts. 
Let us now contemplate one of the most pro- 
found of these facts. We have noticed that 
there is that in us which, like a voice, seems to 



144 THE COMING RELIGION 

prompt or to stop us in any issue of duty. This' 
is what Socrates called his daimon, or divinity. 
Let us become acquainted with this inward 
monitor. We can think of it as the actual 
person, the ideal of what a man should be; it 
is our best or inmost self. It is doubtless in 
the process of development, and at first we 
only dimly know its features. We may not 
always be sure what the voice really says to 
us. But times come with us, if we watch, when 
the active or outside self and the inner self are 
one. These are the hours of the motion of 
obedience, or good will. These are the times 
when our inner self comes to light and reveals 
itself. We are not complete persons when there 
is a discord of wills within us, but only when 
the inner self and the active self are working 
in harmony; at such times we grow. Body 
and mind and soul are at rest, or again are 
equally ready for action. This is health, or 
wholeness, in which every faculty shares. 
There is almost a new science of health, bodily, 
mental, and moral, involved here. For the 
body can never be at its best unless the man is 
at his best, in inward and social harmony. 

There are striking facts of experience when 
we come into unison with our friends, in the 
hours of our love and our service. Even the 



THE NEW THOUGHT OF PRAYER 145 

loving thought or memory of a noble and whole- 
hearted' man or woman, absent from our 
sight or departed from this world, the recollec- 
tion of his face or his words, the consciousness 
of what he would say by way of counsel or 
consolation, has power at times to bring the 
samie inward unison, or peace, or the will to live 
and serve, of which we have just spoken. 
'' What would my father say? " " What would 
my mother tell me ? " At our best, there is a 
heightening of life and activity in opening our 
minds to those thoughts. These movements 
of the inner life are surely as real as any play 
of the molecules or the ions which the physi- 
cists watch, and they are vastly more important 
and practical. 

We have hardly said '' God " yet, but we 
have been touching the facts which lead us up 
to the contemplation of God. Must there not 
be something in the universe higher than the 
inner or best self in each of us, something that 
causes in us mighty throbbing aspirations 
after justice and truth, at the recollection of 
the noble lives? These experiences of the 
inner self are themselves like so many mani- 
festations of a universe life, whose waves 
of intelligence and feeling beat upon us like 
sunshine. 



146 THE COMING RELIGION 

I believe that in all these moods of our higher 
life, of aspiration, willing obedience, trust, 
gladness, affection, sympathy, and generous 
memory, we enjoy spiritual communion, yes, 
veritable communion with God. So far, how- 
ever, it may have seemed to be communion 
through some kind of mediation, through the 
consciousness of our best self, through the help 
of good and true men and women, or through 
" the thought of Christ," as many would choose 
to say. Is it not possible to go farther than 
this ? We have already suggested that we can- 
not really stop here. In those highest moments 
of inner harmony and good will, we have a con- 
sciousness exactly as if we were at home with 
the Life of the universe. In the absence of all 
fear, in the sense of trust and gladness, in 
fullness of life, we enjoy what is meant in the 
remarkable teaching, attributed to Jesus, when 
he describes life in its highest terms as a " one- 
ness,'' or unity. *' We are one with each other 
and one with God." All this is natural, ra- 
tional, and ethical. The experiences of this 
sort do not come when we are asleep and 
dreaming, but when we are most awake and 
most sane. 

So much for the fact of communion with 
God. How much does this cover? See what 



THE NEW THOUGHT OF PRAYER 147 

we actually do at times, and might well do 
more often. We seem almost to carry on a 
conversation in the depths of our hearts. We 
bring to our best self, as to a divinity, or an 
oracle, the questions and problems of life, our 
cares and solicitudes. In the highest mood of 
open-mindedness, obedience, trust, and good 
will, everything stands in the clearest light; 
our brightest thoughts come so, as if spoken 
by another; crooked things straighten into 
form, new meanings appear out of confusion. 
An hour, at our best, in this atmosphere of 
intelligent intercourse does for us what days 
of blind groping in the mists of conceit and 
selfishness cannot effect. Again, as before, 
the conditions are rational and ethical, and 
therefore spiritual. Shall we not say that God, 
or the spirit of the universe, speaks to us at the 
height of our lives? 

The use of words in prayer now appears. 
In the best communion with friends, or with 
our best selves, or directly and consciously with 
God, there is more than feeling or harmony. 
There is thought behind, and the law of thought 
is expression. Words framed, or even spoken 
or written, help express thought and give feel- 
ing its proper flow. This is what Tennyson 
means when he says: 



148 THE COMING RELIGION 

" Speak to Him thou for He hears, and spirit with spirit 
can meet, 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and 
feet.'' 

True, words are feeble, neither are they always 
essential, but they surely help and direct our 
thought; and the noblest worship or commun- 
ion demands the whole man, heart and soul 
and mind. 

This brings us to the subject of prayer in 
the sense of petition. It is a pity that '' the 
highest exercise of the human spirit,'' as Presi- 
dent Eliot of Harvard College has character- 
ized prayer, should be so closely associated with 
the mere asking for favors or benefits. We 
have just seen that prayer, in its largest sense, 
is not so much the effort of the petitioner, as it 
is the attitude of the waiting, listening, and 
willing mind, seeking to know what is truth, 
or duty, in other words, what God bids. It is 
inspiration, or the receiving of life, quite as 
truly as aspiration or desire. It is indeed prop- 
erly the complete circulation, the inflow and 
the outflow of the highest life of man, his 
affections and his will. Its law is freedom of 
motion and utterance. 

There are obviously whole lists of things 
which the atmosphere of devotion or commun- 



THE NEW THOUGHT OF PRAYER 149 

ion makes it impossible to include in prayer. 
The young child might be supposed to prattle 
to his father about the toys, the presents, and 
the sweetmeats that he desires. Better so than 
to be afraid to come to his father at all. But 
no sensible child, coming into sympathy with a 
noble parent, continues asking for trifles and 
the indulgence of his whims and appetites. He 
trusts the parent more and more, and scorns 
to ask for things that the other children would 
be obliged to go without. 

There are, however, in God's world grand 
objects to seek, and worthy to be desired with 
all one's heart. We see and know the real 
values in the hours of our best love and our 
sympathy. We cannot desire too much the wel- 
fare of our friends and our children, of our 
town and our country and the family of man- 
kind. There are long lists of beautiful and 
ideal blessings that we see and seek. Why not 
put them into the most fitting forms of words ? 

Prayer now means more than talking even 
to God. It means the motion of the whole life 
and the whole man. Words only formulate it 
and make it clear. I want the best education 
for my children; I may well think this out in 
my hour of clearest spiritual vision, and ex- 
press in so many words what kind of education. 



150 THE COMING RELIGION 

physical and moral, I desire. But I must pray- 
also with my hands and my skill, and put my 
energy into my prayer, and perhaps save money 
for years, and spend it for the working out of 
my prayer. 

So likewise when men venture to pray to- 
gether in great churches for the peace of the 
world. Let them beware, or they merely say 
vain prayers. If they pray with genuine de- 
sire, if they cannot abide murder, hate, and war, 
and are bound to have peace, let them be ready 
to lift up their voices and hearts, and cast their 
votes too, when the next war scare arises. 
This only is prayer. 

We can see now that prayer is effectual, as 
we had hoped to find. If this is a universe, if 
it is God's world, if in some deep sense " all 
things work together for the manifestation of 
the sons of God,'' then it is a world in which 
all real and deep needs, all noble desires, all 
aspirations for the building up of the kingdom 
of God tend always to come true. The spirit 
and good will of the universe works with our 
spirits and our wills to bring the ideal and de- 
sirable things to pass. All manner of beautiful 
illustrations are at hand to show that this is 
a valid conception of the world and of the rela- 
tion of man's true prayers, for liberty, for order 



THE NEW THOUGHT OF PRAYER 151 

and law, for social justice, for the uplift of the 
level of human happiness, for the consumma- 
tion of all man's rational desires. In this sense 
prayer is the most religious outpouring of the 
whole life of a man toward the procurement, 
in every form, of both the individual and the 
social good. 



CHAPTER XVI 

CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER RELIGIONS 

The question will be asked about the coming 
religion, what its attitude is toward other reli- 
gions, and especially what relation it bears to 
Christianity. Is it Christian? To this last 
question we must answer both Yes and No. 

The religion which we have described is cer- 
tainly not to be identified with any single or 
distinct form of Christianity. There is not an 
historic creed which expresses it, or under 
which one, whose mind has not been sophisti- 
cated by the perversities and casuistry of a 
theological school, would recognize it as latent. 
Most of the creeds, in fact, are made up of prop- 
ositions, such as the Trinitarian formula, or of 
miraculous occurrences, like the virgin birth 
and the bodily resurrection. No untrammeled 
modern mind would think of formulating his 
actual thought, much less his dearest convic- 
tions, in the terms of the Nicene or the 
Apostles' Creed. But men say these creeds, 
as they have been taught to say their prayers, 



OTHER RELIGIONS 153 

as an exercise of conventional or traditional 
religion. 

Historic Christianity, moreover, has been 
mostly a religion centering around a single 
person, its founder. It has exalted the name 
of Christ, not only as " above every other 
name," a sort of spiritual emperor, but as 
so far apart from all other names as to be 
equivalent to another title for God. The time 
has come when men ask questions, and must 
ask them, as to what we mean by the unique 
exaltation of the name of Christ, or the person 
of Jesus. We know something of what earlier 
men meant by their worship of Christ. There 
was a theology of a lost world and a rebel race, 
of the necessity of the expiation of sin, and 
therefore of the miraculous appearance, the 
suffering, and the redeeming death of a divine 
mediator. It is enough to say here that the 
modern mind does not and cannot take this 
scheme of thought seriously. The new ques- 
tion is, what thoughtful men now really think 
and mean when they use the traditional words 
of their creeds. It is easy to repeat the ancient 
words, " The Lord Jesus Christ." In what 
sense is Jesus " Lord " ? 

For example, Jesus is not Lord to men of 
modern education in any church, in matters of 



154 THE COMING RELIGION 

thought, much less of science. Jesus believed 
with his people in demoniacal possession, in a 
day of general judgment, in an almost Mani- 
chean separation of the good and the bad into 
heaven and hell. Who today dreams that the 
New Testament teaching, or the Bible teaching 
generally, could be expected to tally with the 
prevalent modern thought of a universe, in age- 
long processes of development ? Now men who 
think today do not follow Jesus, or take him as 
Master, in any article of their faith which has 
to depend wholly upon his ipse dixit. We may 
as well face this fact. Thus, in all recent dis- 
cussions of the hope of immortality, it is not 
enough to say that Jesus preached it, or, more 
accurately, habitually assumed it. Men must 
be told on what grounds it is probable that the 
nature of man is immortal. In other words, 
the hope of immortality does not rest on any 
single and unique historical event or revelation, 
but on the essential character of true manhood. 
Moreover, very few men actually make Jesus 
their Master in the conduct of their lives. We 
speak here of the men in churches. They 
habitually treat his teachings as impossible. 
Grant that they probably mistake Jesus' teach- 
ing when he says, " Be ye therefore perfect," 
where he was not speaking of perfection in 



OTHER RELIGIONS 155 

detail, but of thoroughness in purpose; grant 
that when he says, " Love thy neighbor as thy- 
self," he meant the will rather than the emo- 
tion. Most men not only give up these great 
texts altogether, but they commonly confess 
that Jesus' teachings and ideals generally are 
impracticable. They then proceed to accuse 
themselves of heinous sin, worthy of '' eternal 
death," because obviously they do not live up 
to an impossible law! It is not our part, we 
are told, to obey, so much as to believe that 
Jesus' blood will save us, even when we do not 
obey. Others frankly go further and set aside 
Jesus' precepts. You must not be meek, they 
say, but strenuous ; you must not turn the other 
cheek, but fight ; you must not give your money 
to the poor, but save and invest it; you must 
take care for the morrow and bear anxieties 
for your children and your business. When a 
Tolstoi therefore presumes to take Jesus as his 
Lord of life, when he adyises everyone to dis- 
miss worriment for the future, when he calls it 
wicked for nations to fight, the Christian world 
holds up its hands, and a notable ex-president 
and churchman writes a paper to show that 
such a man is a fanatic! My point is that 
Christians do not really take Jesus' teachings 
as the law of their lives. How, then, is he their 
Lord? 



156 THE COMING RELIGION 

I said, however, that we might also answer 
Yes to the question whether the coming reh- 
gion will be Christian. It seems easy to grasp 
what central truths Jesus himself cared most 
about. He cared most for justice and mercy 
and the brotherhood of man. He cared im- 
mensely that men should forgive injuries and 
bear no ill will. He made the ethical teach- 
ings of the prophets about righteousness cen- 
tral. He took the dearest of the figures of the 
national religion, and made the Fatherhood of 
God central. He put the emphasis of life, where 
the emphasis belongs, on the reality and the 
development of the spiritual nature. He loved 
the good life. 

It is in no way important to enter into the 
theoretical question, whether or not Jesus abso- 
lutely succeeded in living the good life at all 
times ; that is, whether he never was vexed, or 
impatient, or lost his temper, or failed in com- 
plete good will toward anyone. We certainly 
cannot find in him a miraculous being, man and 
God at once, finite and infinite, fallible and in- 
fallible at the same time, sent once for all on 
a supernatural errand, to die for a race of 
rebels. We as certainly find a man with the 
conditions and limitations of a man. It is 
enough for our purpose that here is a man after 



OTHER RELIGIONS 157 

the type of reality, devotion, good will, whom 
we all love and admire. If it is Christian to 
believe in this type as the normal and coming 
type of mankind, if it is Christian to adopt this 
type and plan one's life accordingly, if it is 
Christian to think the law of good will is the 
most practicable of all laws, then the men of 
the new religion will gladly be counted as 
Christians. 

A brief reference to the teaching of Paul's 
epistles may serve further to illustrate our 
meaning. There is a deal of difficult theologiz- 
ing in Paul. He labored with a kind of meta- 
physics, as in the Epistle to the Romans, to 
prove certain propositions about faith, about 
the work of the blood of Jesus, about the office 
and place of Christ in the hierarchy of heav- 
enly existences. Men have labored as hard as 
Paul, in trying to understand what he meant, 
and have not necessarily become either wiser 
or better. But Paul takes occasion in the fa- 
mous thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to 
the Corinthians, to sum up the substance of his 
religion in a few memorable sentences. Here 
are the law and life of faith, hope, and love. Is 
this Christianity? Is it sufficient? Is it good 
enough, whether one ever reads Paul's theol- 
ogy or not ? I think Paul seems to say, Yes. 



158 THE COMING RELIGION 

If this is so, in view of such a splendid ideal, 
then all the world will be glad to be accounted 
as Christian. 

Historical Christianity has had a reputation 
for being exclusive. It has proclaimed itself to 
be the only and final religion. It has attacked 
all other faiths, and branded them as heathen 
or infidel. It has had a long and most shameful 
record of bloody persecution. In this respect 
again we can never be Christians. The com- 
ing religion is comprehensive. There is, in 
fact, a new science known as Comparative Re- 
ligion. It has chairs in the best orthodox the- 
ological schools. It shows the working of 
man's inner nature, feeling out after reality 
under diverse and even grotesque forms. It 
searches the Bibles of many peoples for the 
noblest utterances of the religious spirit. It 
studies the secret of the religious life in the 
stories of many kinds of saints, in India, in 
Persia, in heterodox churches. It surprises 
the world with the fact of the deep likenesses 
under manifold manifestations of religion. 
It renders all exclusiveness and sectarianism 
preposterous. 

Thus, it is evident that, according to the ex- 
clusive canons of dogmatic and historic Chris- 
tianity, Jesus was not a Christian at all. He 



OTHER RELIGIONS 159 

never could have recited or understood any one 
of the historic creeds. His greatest teachings 
came out of the heart of Judaism. There is 
not one of them that is not traceable to old 
Hebrew law or prophet or psalm. The noblest 
Christianit}^ is only a new form of the best 
Judaism, with its highest values set in heavier 
type. The new flow of life, the humanity, 
the warmer faith, the freedom from rabbin- 
ical narrowness, the atmosphere of enthusi- 
asm, constitute the essence of the new religion. 
If Paul, for example, had really known the 
kernel of his own religion, if he had understood 
the great central facts, as set forth by Micah 
and others hundreds of years before, he never 
would have persecuted the early Christians, and 
there could have been nothing to which he could 
have been converted. As a matter of fact, 
Christianity was a new and necessary form of 
religious development, through which Paul and 
others of his time got a fresh sense of the spir- 
itual reality of the world. The men of the 
twentieth century are again stretching upward 
toward a new and wider reach of vision. 

We see at once the attitude which the com- 
ing religion is bound to take toward all forms 
of religion. The coming religion sets a new 
emphasis, as the greatest of the prophets did, 



160 THE COMING RELIGION 

as Jesus did, as Paul did, as all the great lovers 
of men have tended to do. It says, " Live the 
life of good will. Live as children of God." 
But it sets this old and ever fresh emphasis, as 
men in early times were not prepared to do, 
with a fresh grip, in its new conception of the 
universe. The whole universe, it says, goes 
the way of goodness. Good will is its law. 
The good life is here and now. The whole 
world, not a single part of it only, is its 
province. 

Historic Christianity swung away from and 
combated the old Greek ideal of beauty; it 
cultivated the ascetic habit^ and despised the 
body; it poured contempt on "the world," 
that is, on the common lot of man, his business, 
his art, his struggle toward civilization. The 
new religion leaves out no worthy ideal ; it en- 
nobles the body and preaches the law of its 
normal health ; it reverences science ; it under- 
stands and uses all clean pleasures as its min- 
isters. Over all it holds up the universal law 
of good will. What hurts life, embitters it, 
narrows it, defeats its main intent, works in- 
justice, this only is wrong. There is no sin 
against God that is not a hurt to man. There 
is no wrong done to man that is not a wrong 
to religion. 



OTHER RELIGIONS 161 

It follows that we who accept the new reli- 
gion must be tolerant and sympathetic toward 
the men of all forms of faith; we must be 
frank in our judgments, and we are bound to 
say what we think. But we are bound to be 
essentially respectful. Our habitual method is 
not to combat or destroy, but to construct, to 
build up, to give aid and comfort. We see good 
and truth wherever truth and good are. We 
are glad to find among men who are shy or 
even contemptuous of us, whatever common 
elements of goodness there are. It is our busi- 
ness to interpret the valid spirit of religion 
under the harshest forms, and to understand 
other men's religions better than they under- 
stand ours, if possible better than they under- 
stand their own. This must be possible, if we 
possess the central point of view and the good 
spirit. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE CHRISTOCENTRIC IDEA 

The great Christocentric question now recurs 
in a new shape. It is a question of practical 
propaganda. It is said that a world religion 
must have some single person or founder whose 
special cult gives it currency. Jesus, Buddha, 
Mahomet, are thus cited as historical proof of 
the need of a person around whom devotees 
and sentiments may rally. The fact is, how- 
ever, that the history of religions, like the his- 
tory of politics, can never show us from the 
past what the future will be. When American 
democracy took shape, it was predicted, on the 
basis of historical evidence, that it could not 
persist. Did not history seem to demonstrate 
that great aggregations of government always 
depend on personal rule and on the principle 
of monarchy ? We know better now. Neither 
is there any lack of popular sentiment toward 
the changing heads of our gigantic republican 
government. 



THE CHRISTOCENTRIC IDEA 163 

We do not, indeed, at all disparage the high 
value of sentiment toward a noble person. The 
human figure doubtless translates the concep- 
tion of the life of God, behind all persons. 
Thus many men have habitually come to use 
the name and the ideal figure of Jesus as syn- 
onymous in their minds with God. They tell 
us of the communion which they enjoy with 
Christ. We throw no doubt upon the fact of a 
state of real exaltation which they have learned 
to stimulate by the use of this personal means of 
suggestion. We only say that there are other 
means to the same exaltation of mind. We 
insist in the case of all exalted moods of 
feeling upon one test of their worth and real- 
ity; it is the ethical and human test. The ques- 
tion is, whether or not the exalted and happy 
mood of personal attachment gives a man a 
fresh grip upon the realities of justice, sym- 
pathy, helpfulness. We urge, also, that there 
are men and women who may not imaginatively 
feel a quiver of sentiment at the name of Jesus, 
or any other historic personage, who neverthe- 
less may and do catch the same kind of high 
feeling at the sight, or the thought and memory, 
of true-hearted men and women whom they 
have known. All good friends thus become 
genuine mediators to translate the love of God 



164 THE COMING RELIGION 

and bring about a religious attitude. Men 
straightway go on to do braver and more hon- 
est acts in the memory of such personal friends, 
— of a mother, a teacher, a good minister or 
physician. Thus I call it an uplift of religious 
emotion when the city of Boston paused in its 
toil to pay its tribute of reverence on the occa- 
sion of the death of the late Bishop Brooks. 

The play of personal sentiment in religion 
is the same as it is in the realm of patriotism, 
of art, or of letters. Certain personal names 
stir our associations and give flow to a fresh 
stream of interest, zest, emotion, disinterested- 
ness. The national heroes, from Washington 
down to the latest popular idol, serve every 
orator, writer, or teacher who desires to warm 
the popular heart. Light, life, and love spring 
from the great names and deeds. The more of 
them the better ; the more honorable and effec- 
tive sentiment, the more excellent character is 
developed. 

The coming religion is not likely to be less 
rich in the possibilities of personal attachment 
than were the religions of the past. It will 
simply be more democratic. Not one only, 
but a whole procession of noble leaders and 
teachers marches before our eyes. Not one 
single type of character, but many beautiful 



THE CHRISTOCENTRIC IDEA 165 

types appear. Not a single life of Christ only 
will be taught to children and youth, but a 
library of the lives of the men and women of 
good v/ill, who have made the world better, 
will be at "hand for constant use to persuade 
and inspire. 

Moreover, the ideal known as " the Christ 
life " in a very true sense will remain. Its 
substance is the idea of something infinite and 
godlike at the heart of humanity. It is indeed 
vague, like all ideals ; it is never quite the same 
in any two minds; it is composed of elements 
drawn from different sources and from ac- 
quaintance with different persons. It is no- 
where, for instance, today identical with the 
actual hfe and person of Jesus; for no one 
knows just what Jesus' life was in detail. But 
the image of Jesus, wherever men have heard 
of his story, his faith in God, his patience, his 
devotion, his concern for the poor and op- 
pressed, has entered into the ideal of " the 
Christ," that is, into the world's thought of 
the most perfect man. In a very free but real 
sense this will remain among the permanent 
treasures of mankind, and may well continue 
to be called by the familiar name. Once dis- 
sociated from the bondage of an exclusive 
creed, no Jew, no Buddhist, no Confucian, no 



166 THE COMING RELIGION 

Mohammedan would ever object to the use of 
this guiding ideal. 

The coming religion is already being pro- 
claimed. It is the substance of the most effec- 
tive and most inspiring sermons in many a 
church. A growing number of leaders of reli- 
gious thought have already accepted its main 
emphasis. All creeds are being interpreted into 
its simple terms. The best men of different 
religions are drawing closer together and rec- 
ognizing their common faith. Missionaries 
who went to India and China to convert the 
" heathen '' to dogmatic Christianity, are be- 
ginning frankly to tell us that the people of 
Asia will never receive a religion, at once alien 
and irrational, such as Christians once vainly 
tried, to foist upon them.^ The coming religion 
of Japan and China and India, they tell us, 
must be a religion close to the lives, the best 
thought, and the sentiment of the native races. 
This is really to say that there will be one great 
common religion, broad and comprehensive, 
for all the families of man. The larger reli- 
gion is everywhere thus growing out of the 
older forms. It will never be exclusively 

^ See, for example, "India: Its Life and People," by 
Rev. John P. Jones, or " The Spirit of the Orient," by 
Prof. G. W. Knox. 



THE CHRISTOCENTRIC IDEA 167 

preached as the only rehgion. But daily the 
emphasis is being changed in the direction of 
its distinctly ethical and humane values. Once 
firmly placed, this emphasis can never be 
altered. 

Schiller, in his drama of " Nathan the Wise," 
brings together Saladin, the Mohammedan, 
Richard, the Christian king, and Nathan, the 
Jew. The three men with their three exclusive 
religions begin their intercourse with suspi- 
cion and hate toward each other. But under the 
pressure of the common life, the common ex- 
perience of peril and toil, the sight in each of 
the common nature, the common faith and 
heroism and chivalry, the three men become 
one. Their three religions were never really 
diverse, but only forms of the one deeper reli- 
gion behind all the forms. This is the religion 
that is everywhere coming to light, as fast as 
the men of many races come to look into each 
other's eyes and to see the gleam of the com- 
mon humanity. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 

The pressing question about the church is not 
whether it will continue to exist or not. The 
question is under what forms it will continue. 
As surely as religion is imbedded in the human 
soul, as surely as it yields a fundamental and 
necessary conception of man's place in the uni- 
verse, as surely, then, as he is at the same time 
a social and a religious being, there must con- 
tinue to be some suitable organization and 
social embodiment of his religious life. There 
is no permanent human interest, political, eco- 
nomic, educational, artistic, musical, that does 
not instinctively tend to socialize itself for its 
more effective expression. If you have the 
theatre for lovers of the drama, you will cer- 
tainly have some kind of church for the lovers 
of religion. 

There is a good deal of panicky complaint 
about the desertion of the churches, and espe- 
cially by the working men. A very strong case, 
however, may be made out that churches, 



THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 169 

faulty as they are, have never had a greater 
influence over the world for the direction of 
man's higher life and for civilization than they 
now have. It is probable that there was never 
any long period, even in the fervor of the early 
Protestant reformation, when the whole popu- 
lation of any land frequented the churches 
every Sunday. Regular attendance at church, 
on purpose to hear sermons, seems to have 
been a provincial fashion; the Catholics never 
required it. When the priest or minister com- 
pelled people to church, sometimes, as in old 
Massachusetts, with the whip of the secular 
power, there is little to show for the moral and 
spiritual gain that came of such enforced 
church-going. It was compatible with cruel 
customs, tyrannical laws, and much religious 
indifference. It held its own, not so much be- 
cause men were living in an age of faith, as 
because they lived in an age of superstition. 

It is time to enquire what we mean by a 
church. We may say, in general, that the 
church is an organisation or fellozvship of 
people for the furtherance and expression of, 
their religious life. Ideally all the people of a 
community ought to be thus organized to- 
gether, in which case the church would express 
the spiritual aspect of a people, as the state ex- 



170 THE COMING RELIGION 

presses their political activities. As a matter 
of fact, however, v^e are obliged to content 
ourselves with a very broad and rather loose 
definition of the church, so as to cover a great 
variety of ecclesiastical phases, many of them 
quite partial and inadequate. Thus, we speak 
of the Catholic Church, the Jewish Church, 
the Christian Science Church, the Mormon 
Church. These and others are social attempts 
to develop and express religious thought, feel- 
ing, and life. We may be skeptical about the 
genuineness of some of them, but we should like 
to believe that all of them have a kernel of use- 
fulness. We may well ask whether the people 
in them would be better men and citizens, if 
they were left without any form of religious 
association? 

There are several great and perennial uses 
that a genuine church ought to serve. Perhaps 
most people would say that the first of these is 
^' the worship of God.'' This is an ancient and 
traditional opinion. A community of people 
ought, it is said, to pay their stated respect of 
praise, reverence, adoration, and gifts to the 
Master of their lives; otherwise punishment 
might befall them, as for the crime of lese 
majeste. Modern men, however, cannot easily 
take this idea of worship very seriously. They 



THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 171 

have ceased to think of the Infinite Life after 
the fashion of a jealous, oriental monarch. The 
higher their conception of God, the more im- 
possible it becomes to think of Him as attach- 
ing importance to ecclesiastical, rites and forms, 
to the bending bodies of worshipers, to recita- 
tions of psalms or anthems of praise. The 
greatest of the Hebrew prophets, in their zeal 
for social righteousness, were long ago out- 
growing the thought of a God who cared for 
gifts, for the blood of rams and bulls, or ador- 
ing words. 

There was something real, however, behind 
the old conception of the duty of worship. We 
might still call it worship, if we may be allowed 
somewhat to re-adapt the meaning of the word. 
Let us say, then, that the first great use of the 
church is to establish a cult or habit of religion. 
No noble habit of thought, or feeling, or action, 
comes without nurture. There are suitable 
forms of words that convey worthy and ennob- 
ling modes of feeling. We are better for hav- 
ing learned these words in our childhood, even 
at the cost of some effort; our memories are 
richer for being stored with noble psalms, 
verses, poems, and mottoes. There are moods 
of feeling that have to be cultivated, which do 
not come without the proper atmosphere; this 



172 THE COMING RELIGION 

is what we mean by saying that religion always 
needs some kind of a cult, and that the church 
has its use in establishing exalted habits of 
thought and feeling. 

There is such a cult of the family religion in 
the best homes. It consists in every genuine 
form of affection, in the morning and evening 
greetings, in filial respect and thoughtfulness, 
in deference toward the aged, in habits of lov- 
ing service, in friendly thoughts, words, and 
deeds for guests and strangers. This is the 
cult of domestic religion. It depends upon a 
somewhat costly atmosphere of good will; it 
comes by learning the familiar forms and 
habits, through which good will is exercised. 

There is also an appropriate cult of patriot- 
ism. Boys and girls do not learn to love and 
serve their country without any nurture, or the 
forming of habits of patriotic thought and feel- 
ing. There are certain ideas about one's coun- 
try, noble pride in its history, dreams and ideals 
for its future, sentiments of loyalty and devo- 
tion toward it, which are bred in the minds of 
children in the best homes and schools, by force 
of habit, and through a certain cost and prac- 
tice. Patriotic poems learned by heart and 
often sung, bits of great orations of noted 
statesmen, such as the Gettysburg Address, 



THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 173 

even the repeated ritual of the flag, and espe- 
cially the instinctive imitation of habits of 
thought and feeling, and especially of public- 
spirited and generous conduct, touching the 
city or the country, as practised by admired 
teachers and parents, tend to the nurture of 
patriotism among the youth. There is a great 
present need of such nurture of patriotic emo- 
tion, for the idea is abroad that everyone may 
look to his country or city, as men used to look 
to their gods, to bestow favors and privileges. 
We need, on the contrary, to form habits in our 
youth in the direction of obligation, duty, will- 
ing service, loyalty, and devotion for the civic 
and public good. This is a form of religion; 
it needs nurture and education and many wise 
and patriotic teachers. 

The social nurture of religion is similar. A 
man goes now and then to a church as a curi- 
ous stranger, and he may or may not feel the 
force and use of the cult, or " worship." But 
let him become somewhat familiar and sympa- 
thetic with it, let him try to understand what 
it means. He finds a prevalent habit of thought 
about the universe, as wonderful, divine and 
orderly, about the Lord of all life as beneficent 
Will, about the life of man as an order of happy 
and friendly service, about the good life as 



174 THE COMING RELIGION 

normal and gladsome. He hears noble forms 
of words, ancient and modern, that tend to con- 
vey magnificent thoughts. He finds a certain 
mood, or attitude, or habit of feeling, trustful, 
fearless, aspiring, affectionate. Again and 
again he subjects himself to this mode of feel- 
ing, as to a sunny atmosphere. The lonely man, 
coming out of his individualism, touches elbows 
with his fellows, strangers before, now neigh- 
bors, kinsmen and brothers, in this higher mood 
of social feeling. 

It is a rare man who does not need some cul- 
tivation of his higher nature; it is a rare man 
who can give himself this kind of nurture alone 
and unassisted. It is essentially a social habit 
of thought and feeling. The man enters thus 
into the relation of a fellow citizen in the uni- 
verse. No one can too often feel this mood and 
enter into this attitude. Till it become the ha- 
bitual attitude of our lives we are not yet our 
best selves. This habit, both of thought and 
feeling, is essentially religious; it always rises 
toward the consciousness of the eternal good 
will. We feel the bonds of our religion, not 
merely as brothers, but as children of the great 
Parent of life. 

The second constant and growing need and 
use of a church is as a species of university. 



THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 175 

The church takes up the work of education and 
carries it to its culmination and its unity. 
Everywhere else we see life in parts and de- 
tachments; we learn sciences and languages, 
we pass through various and strange experi- 
ences, we catch side-lights upon life, we are 
perplexed with its myriad many-sidedness. 
There is no need so great as to bring the bits 
and the parts together, and interpret the whole- 
ness of the meaning. The church cannot teach 
science or economics or government, but it is 
set to testify to the integrity of life, that all 
truth is one, that there is nowhere any possible 
division between business and humanity, be- 
tween morals and politics, between science 
and religion. 

The church is set forever to take up each 
man's shifting experiences and show him how 
to relate them together and to turn them into 
significance. The church considers man as a 
person, a child of God, in the midst of a costly 
process of spiritual growth. The teaching of 
the church must help him to see the secret of 
the good life, which assimilates everything into 
terms of faith, courage, sympathy, helpfulness. 
All manner of great words and beautiful lives 
contribute to the treasury of the church and 
make it a university of the art of life. There 



176 THE COMING RELIGION 

is a continuous story of the lives of the men of 
good will, all of whom illustrate the doctrine 
of the divine universe, which every item of 
knowledge and experience goes to make up. 

The church plays the part of a university for 
old and young. Even young children may be 
able to feel, before they quite understand, the 
significance of its teaching. Men never become 
so old as not to need the service of an inter- 
preter to bring their lives into order and sig- 
nificance. Parents need this kind of teaching 
in order to bring up their children to know the 
great lasting values. The work of the church 
in the training of children and youth, on the 
side of their ideal interest in ethics, in hu- 
manity, in faith and hope, is everywhere re- 
ceiving a new recognition. What other exist- 
ing agency is there to carry on this work ? The 
only important question is how to do it vastly 
better than churches are doing it now. There 
can be no doubt that they will learn to do it 
better, as soon as they free themselves from 
the shackles of a mass of unwieldy and conven- 
tional traditions about Bible study, and give 
themselves the liberty of a vastly larger store 
of inspiring biographical material than they 
have ever had in the single life of Jesus, and 
the few figures that dimly appear in the Old 



THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 177 

and New Testaments. That these Bible stories 
are of inestimable worth is only the greater 
reason for making connection between them 
and the men and women who are today making 
modern history. 

The third great function of the church has 
been too often forgotten. Men have made 
much of two sides of religion, good thought 
and high emotion ; but what are noble thought 
and high emotion good for, unless they carry 
us over into conduct? This is the test of their 
genuineness : " Ye shall know them by their 
fruits." 

The popular churches of the world have 
so far mostly contented themselves with their 
ritual and their prayers and hymns. It was 
enough if the sacred words, '' thrown out at " 
certain dim and grand ideas, were properly 
uttered; meanwhile men have been sent away 
to shift for themselves, without any ritual of 
religion, as to their conduct toward one an- 
other. To be right in religion was to be 
right in ceremony or in belief, but not neces- 
sarily to be right by the Golden Rule. Even 
when the church has prescribed a sort of 
puritan code of conduct, it has been made 
highly individualistic. All sorts of social 
wrongs have gone on around the churches and 

12 



178 THE COMING RELIGION 

by the action and countenance of their mem- 
bers. The church has not usually thought that 
its proper business was to meddle with slavery, 
or special privilege, or the crowding of tene- 
ments, or the ignorance, disease, and shame 
of other people's children. 

The coming religion is threefold and all 
round, or it fails to be religion at all. It is 
good thinking, and good feeling, and also 
especially good conduct. We do not indeed 
prescribe how church people shall bring their 
faith and their good will to bear upon pressing 
social injustices, upon race and class prejudice, 
upon the government of cities and nations, upon' 
the temperance and the peace of the world. All 
we say is that the connection must somehow 
be made, and the social needs of the community 
and the world must be effectively met. We 
do not believe a real church can exist without 
laying its hands, or at least the hands of its 
members, on the pressing tasks of our modern 
civilization. The church that puts its empha- 
sis on the words, " Thy kingdom come. Thy 
will be done," must go forth to do what it sees 
in its vision. If there is a valid social cult or 
religion, it must ensue in social activities and 
social righteousness. It is intolerable that men 
should come together upon the heights of their 



THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 179 

lives in grand common thoughts and feeHngs, 
and separate to be straightway mere irrespon- 
sible individuals. Now comes the test of their 
religion. What can they do together to make 
their high thoughts real? 

It is impossible to tell what form church life 
is destined to take. It seems certain that there 
are now altogether too many churches ; no little 
community of a few thousand people needs a 
dozen separate churches. Protestant sectarian- 
ism has come to be specially wasteful, prepos- 
terous, and divisive. In the only sense in which 
a religious worship has any use, there is no 
room for a dozen exclusive varieties of it. 
There is room, indeed, for diversity of form 
and minor details of opinion, but for no sec- 
tarianism. The main thing at present, how- 
ever, is that the leaders of churches should 
clearly see what their churches are for. How 
shall we effectively form habits of faith in God 
and faith in man ? How shall we cultivate the 
attitude of good will to all? How shall we 
best teach men the facts of the divine universe, 
and interpret their lives into hopeful signifi- 
cances ? How shall we turn the hearts of chil- 
dren to love the good life? How shall we 
apply the moral and spiritual power of our 
communities to procure social justice and 
happiness ? 



180 THE COMING RELIGION 

Whoever asks these questions in earnest will 
find the way to their answer. If the better way 
shuts up some churches altogether, if it alters 
or even abolishes certain modes of so-called 
" worship/' if it involves new and costly work 
in teaching the young, if it changes hours of 
service and requires more expenditure of time, 
if it commands all to say more and more " we 
and ours " instead of " I and mine,'' wherever 
the way leads, it is a good way and no one will 
ever be sorry for having taken it. 

What will become of the present army of 
ministers? No one can tell. It is impossible 
to believe that it is well to preach so many 
thousands of dry and conventional sermons as 
are now preached every Sunday to innumer- 
able straggling congregations. It is a whole- 
some sign of the times that fewer candidates 
for the ministry offer themselves. It is likely 
that a growing economic pressure will act 
largely to reduce the number of paid ministers. 
There will be, we suspect, an increase of such 
voluntary and disinterested service of the 
church as has usually been cheerfully offered 
at those times whenever religion has been a 
matter of vital and growing interest among 
men. 

There are, however, great careers of useful- 



THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 181 

ness possible for genuine ministers. There will 
be an everlasting demand in the great towns 
for men who can set forth in real prophetic 
fashion the infinite values of human life, who 
can translate ordinary life into terms of faith 
and hope, who can show the way, and persuade 
their fellows to do the deeds of the new 
civilization. 

There are notable careers, also, before the 
well-equipped man who will take a whole com- 
munity as his parish, whether in town or coun- 
try, and devote all his powers to serve its ideal 
interests. The country needs thousands of 
such men, helpers, friends, teachers, leaders, 
inspirers, men of unfaltering and indomitable 
good will. We may safely sum up the subject 
by saying that there is doubtless actual call 
and need for more real ministers of religion 
than at present exist, and if they are truly min- 
isters, that is, servants and helpers of man- 
kind, they will not be suffered to starve. 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE MODERN RELIGIOUS VIEW OF EVIL 

A FLOOD of difficulties seems sometimes to 
surge up against the foundations of religion. 
What do we know about God, or any reality 
back of the shifting play of matter and force? 
How do we know that there is any deeper 
reality? Why, if there is a good God, in any 
sense of the word, does He not make Himself 
plainly known to everyone? If He cares for 
us, why should He permit any doubt of His 
care? Why, if He cares, and is good, and has 
infinite power, does He let the world suffer 
untold miseries? How can infinite goodness 
exist, with power to match it, in a world which 
contains Africa and its slave trade, Turkey 
and its abominable misrule, Russian prisons 
and Siberian exile, London slums, the white- 
slave iniquity, and infernal lynchings in 
America? Could not even a wise and good 
man manage the world better than this ? May 
not the power behind things, whatever it is, be 
somewhat helpless before such a world as we 
live in? 



MODERN RELIGIOUS VIEW OF EVIL 183 

These questions are forced upon men's minds 
by the pressure of all manner of facts, and it 
cannot be irreverence to bring them to light. 
To ask them belongs to the intelligence of 
man; they are man's cry for truth, justice, 
mercy, reality. To be afraid to ask them would 
be superstition and actual atheism, as if one 
feared that his religion was hollow and his 
world only stuffed w^ith straw. To ask them 
is to trust that there may be a satisfying an- 
swer; it is more reverent to face the questions 
than to stifle or evade them. 

It is a curious fact that everything in the 
world goes with a rhythmical motion. The 
light comes in waves; so sound comes to our 
ears. As the bodily health has its tides of full- 
ness and emptiness, so the mind sways in the 
strength or the feebleness of its convictions. 
We surmise that the spirit of the universe 
could not possibly make us aware of reality, 
without these costly processes of contrast, 
change, and reaction. Language itself is no 
continuous flow of intelligence; its pauses and 
even the harshness of consonantal sounds are 
as necessary as the smooth and singable vowels. 
There is an everlasting principle of contrast 
through which the mark of emphasis is set 
upon the higher values of thought, and the in- 



184 THE COMING RELIGION 

telligence is urged and prompted. The law of 
cost, everywhere present, pursues the mind; 
labor and pain, tormenting questions and 
gloomy doubts are a part of the mode of its 
movement toward its victories of assurance and 
conviction. We may reverently suppose that 
all this is involved in the nature of the uni- 
verse. It is no arbitrary will of God that makes 
it so. It has to be so, like the relations of num- 
bers, which God could not will to be otherwise. 
Wherever in life are the joy, the significance, 
and the content less because of the toil and risk 
of the infinite quest ? 

A vessel is sailing along a perilous coast in 
the depths of a fog bank; the pilot cannot see 
a boat's length ahead ; angry waves break here 
and there and reveal the ugly reefs ; one looks 
out on a misty and dismal fragment of a world. 
Suddenly a transformation scene occurs; the 
wind has shifted, the fogs vanish, the sun ap- 
pears; the rough and dreadful coast smiles 
with green fields and forests; the harbor en- 
trance shows itself around a splendid head- 
land. Which picture presented reality? They 
were both true; but the greater included the 
less and explained the other; the greater 
scene was there all the time, although invisible 
while the fog lasted. The fog and the peril 



MODERN RELIGIOUS VIEW OF EVIL 185 

were only a phase of the voyage ; not the pilot 
and the sailors, but only the passengers, were 
terrified. 

Life is forever giving us this lesson. We 
learn a part at a time; now and then we look 
up and catch a hint of how the parts fit to- 
gether. We see a difficult phase of life and are 
anxious about it; we wait and presently we 
catch sight of the wholeness of life, and are 
comforted. This is the secret of the ancient 
faith; " I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills." 
The clouds pass, the dust settles ; the hills and 
the stars and the sunshine abide. 

I have suggested the presence and the law of 
rhythm and contrast. It is the nature of intelli- 
gence that everything can be translated into 
either positive or negative terms. The same 
facts and figures can be made to work either 
way, to debit or credit, to loss or gain, pessi- 
mism or optimism. You can translate the dull- 
ness of pupils, the continual complaints about 
the schools from employers and parents, the 
provoking inefficiency of teachers, into the fail- 
ure of the educational system. You can find 
facts to translate your friendships into dis- 
trust and marriage into unhappiness. You 
can make out a black case against democracy 
or any other system of government. You can 



186 THE COMING RELIGION 

find sins enough to write a wretched indict- 
ment against the people of any race or color. 
You can sum up all the facts with the negative 
sign, and turn the history of mankind into a 
record of injustice, cruelty, and futility, with 
hopeless death closing the wearisome story. 
Go as far as you like with this process. 

You turn now, whenever you will, and you 
only need to alter the emphasis of a few of the 
facts, to recognize certain forgotten values, and 
correct your perspective, in order to reverse 
every pessimistic conclusion. The facts show 
that the children are getting on in the schools ; 
most of them are hopeful pupils; here and 
there you discover a genuine teacher beyond 
all price; the system of education is not good 
enough, but it is good and not evil. So, 
likewise, the friendship which begins to fail 
under the chill of suspicion, warmed with a 
little love, fairly blossoms. Marriage, which 
taken with the ugly handle of selfishness was 
proving a bestial relation, taken with honorable 
regard, becomes a bond of everlasting beauty. 
The democratic theory of government only 
needed more of the democratic spirit behind it. 
The men and women of the despised race, re- 
garded with a little humane respect, are found 
to be full of idealism, latent conscience, and 



MODERN RELIGIOUS VIEW OF EVIL 187 

social will. The history of mankind, read with 
proper emphasis on its true points of value, so 
far from being a mere record of corruption and 
inhumanity, turns out to be one long and tri- 
umphant march upwards, from the level of the 
beast to the development of men and women 
as true, as brave, as noble, as open in their 
minds and large-hearted, as any " superman " 
that the genius of a modern story-teller ever 
invented. 

The truth is, mankind are naturally and in- 
curably religious. No negative arrangement 
of life proves credible, except for a few unfor- 
tunate astigmatics. It is not because in one 
case you take the ugly facts and in the other 
case leave them all out and mix a different 
variety of paints for your picture ; it is because 
the negative story leaves out the biggest things 
that exist, — the sun and the stars, justice and 
good will, faith and hope. 

" Yes," someone says, " if we could only be 
sure of God, and that He cares for us ! " And 
yet you may be sure of God all the time. For 
you learn of God as you learn the reality of 
your friends. You know your friend by ob- 
serving the spiritual laws of friendship. You 
do not know the friend merely by outward 
signs and through the senses, or by the laws 



188 THE COMING RELIGION 

of matter. You probably never altogether 
know him; there is a residuum of his nature 
always beyond you, acts that you have not the 
key to explain. But here and there gleams of 
beauty shine out of the inner being of the man 
and make you trust him; you become more 
perfectly sure of him through years of mutual 
approach. You might any day leave out the 
significant costly passages that have marked 
the course of your love, and out of the common- 
place remainder and your distrust over the 
unknown elements of his life, reduce your 
friendship to zero. You know better than to 
do this. Friendship is its own proof; you 
know if you have tasted it. 

You ought, by the same kind of signs, flash- 
ing out in the most precious hours of your 
existence, sometimes from the face of a living 
man, or from the memory of a saint, often 
also without the thought of any man, to be 
equally sure of the reality and eternal presence 
of God. You act towards your friend, whose 
inner self you never saw, as if he were good, 
and you experience the reaction of reality. 
You act towards the life of the universe as if it 
were goodness, and you also experience the re- 
action of reality. At such hours you live what 
may well be called the " eternal life." How 



MODERN RELIGIOUS VIEW OF EVIL 189 

should anyone ever expect to know it unless he 
keeps its laws? 

The field of religion is not different from the 
field of science. The processes are much the 
same. It is all one universe. The intelligence, 
reaching out for facts, presses forward from 
the facts already found, in trust that more facts 
will verify its guesses. It is faith or confidence 
in each instance, not blind but reasoning faith, 
— the divine " imagination '' that Mr. Tyndal 
has praised. We talk of matter and atoms and 
electricity, but the words are as mysterious as 
" truth and. reality." No one ever saw the 
matter or the force; we deal with them only 
through signs; they speak to us in a kind of 
language, and we believe in them. We might 
even doubt their existence, and we should still 
have to behave as if they were real ! It is so in 
religion. We had better conduct ourselves as 
if justice, truth, goodness, love were the eter- 
nal things, for the universe certainly conducts 
itself so. It reacts to meet every act of confi- 
dence in its living goodness. 

The fact is, there are a set of facts within 
us quite as real as any facts that we count and 
measure and weigh. We are at least as sure 
of the workings of our own minds and the 
inner self as we are of the reports of our senses. 



190 THE COMING RELIGION 

The duty and the need of justice, the quahty 
of true love, the vital action of trust or faith, 
both towards man and towards the universe, 
are indisputable facts involved in the very es- 
sence of our being. The demand of the mind 
for order, for unity, for intelligible significance, 
so that the universe shall be found worthy of 
our quest for truth, is among the most solid 
facts of our intellectual furniture. The re- 
sponse of our higher nature to the touch of the 
facts of the spiritual realm is exactly akin to 
the response of our minds to the great mathe- 
matical axioms and the laws of numbers. 

It is these inner facts of our being which 
forever forbid us to be content with any futile 
or negative theory of the universe, either on 
the side of matter or on the side of mind or 
spirit. An inward necessity urges us to think 
that our bodies are in some valid sense real, 
and we, the selves within them, are real ; that 
the vast visible world is real, at least in the 
reality of the relations that make it a uni- 
verse; and so too that the life behind all, ris- 
ing out of the depths of being into beauty and 
good will, is equally real. It is life, mental, 
moral, and even physical, to think thus, and 
failure of life to think otherwise. 

But why does not God give man all these 



MODERN RELIGIOUS VIEW OF EVIL 191 

great facts, if they are facts, v/ithout so long 
and laborious a process of development ? This 
is like the question of the child, impatient to 
be a man without having first been a child. The 
infinite power could not, we surmise, make a 
man without the process of childhood, nor a 
Christ without the original, childish, barbarian, 
and animal ancestry. Is not the man worth the 
cost of his childhood, and the Christlike men 
worth the cost of all the ages of animalism? 
W^e do not need to think of the animal, the 
child, or the barbarian as futile or wicked or 
unhappy. Wc have no business to judge the 
unfinished thing in the process by the standard 
of the finished product. The process was never 
bad, judged merely as a process ; the animal 
was not bad as an animal, nor the child as a 
child. The thing in the process becomes bad, 
only when it stops going on to the next stage of 
its being. The boy becomes " bad " when he 
remains a boy instead of becoming a man. 
The Turk or the Czar is intolerable, not in 
the light of the world of Nebuchadnezzar, 
but in the world of Emerson and Tolstoi. 
The increasing horror of mankind over human 
atrocities is the signal that the day of their 
departure is at hand. 



CHAPTER XX 

CONCLUSIONS 

In the face of all doubts and difficulties and in 
our blackest moods of depression there remain 
certain great facts of experience, which consti- 
tute religion and which nothing but religion 
accounts for. We have obeyed duty at times, 
when it seemed to promise us nothing but 
trouble. We have found, strangely enough, 
that the best things of life have invariably come 
so. No price would tempt us to throw out of 
our lives these moments of costly duty. We 
have also followed the bidding of that love, 
whose law is not to get but to give, and the 
whole world has been illumined in consequence. 
Seeking not to get but to give, saying not " I 
and mine " but '' we and ours,'' friendship, 
marriage, parenthood, the civic and national 
life, the relations with all kinds and conditions 
of men, have been made to shine out in a new 
and wonderful light. 

We have also tried the experiment of a 
rational trust. We have trusted our children. 



CONCLUSIONS 193 

we have trusted our neighbors, we have trusted 
human nature in strangers; we have trusted 
the laws of the universe, and beheved that it 
is a universe; we have gone on trusting in 
the days of disappointment and sorrow; and 
again the world has responded majestically 
to our confidence in it. Men have treated us, 
on the whole, better and not worse than we 
expected, and strangers have even surprised 
us with their humanity. The law of trust 
and good will has held good. Our failures, 
our real troubles, our serious losses have come 
on the side of our egotism, our selfishness, 
our narrowness and suspicion, never on the 
side of our love or our trust. This is to say 
that the world has actually behaved to us as 
God's world. 

We are not speaking here of passages from 
the lives of the " saints " or of people who have 
been considered pious, or of facts that men 
commonly call " religious.'' We refer to a 
large, common and democratic, human and 
most religious class of facts, which many men 
are shy of talking about at all. Few know how 
frequent they are. Thus, a neighbor lately told 
me what the world knew nothing of, how he 
had struggled to pay every dollar of his debts 
with interest, and how the peace of a good con- 
is 



194 THE COMING RELIGION 

science had come to him when he had accom- 
plished his task. Was not this " the peace of 
God"? 

Our effort has been to show and illustrate 
the fact that men are not less but more reli- 
gious than they suppose. There is one mem- 
orable modern life which clinches our argu- 
ment, namely, the life of Abraham Lincoln. 
In no conceivable sense can this be described 
as a life of conventional religion. Here was 
no member of a church; there was not a 
creed in the world to which he could have 
given his assent. He was caught up into no 
seventh heaven of mystic ecstasy. But this 
plain man, at his best, in his faith in good- 
ness and truth and justice, in his trust in 
God, in his trust in and love for the people, 
walked before men as a veritable son of God. 
On his ethical side there seem to have been 
moments of his life when, as truly as any of 
the mystics, he was one with God. No Ameri- 
can of any church would be willing to go to a 
heaven where Abraham Lincpln and such as 
he would be shut out. The truth is, that the 
whole world is at heart already on the basis 
of the new religion. 

Certain conclusions arise from another and 
even more spiritual, yet quite universal, class 



CONCLUSIONS 195 

of facts. I refer to those which belong in the 
realm of peril, sorrow, trouble, pain, and be- 
reavement. Men have always longed for some 
consolation in view of the sorrows and losses 
of life. Does the infinite Power, Life, Good 
Will, care for us, and make significant use of 
our lives? We are able to reply that it seems 
as if such care, significance, order, and use 
were the rule and not the exception. We may 
not be able, as men once tried to do, to dis- 
cover any kind of special providences, wherein 
we get exemptions for ourselves from the 
common lot, or have particular revelations in 
which God makes Himself known to us and 
not to others, but we have found something 
better, more consolatory, and more demo- 
cratic, namely, a deep general law of all human 
life. This law is, that no bitter or sorrowful 
experience ever comes to a man, which may 
not be so taken up and used and translated, in 
the solvent spirit of good will and trust, as to 
enter not only into the innermost treasure- 
house of the man's spiritual possessions, but 
into the common wealth of faith and sym- 
pathy and power. There is a mutuality in the 
bearing of sorrow and trouble wherein no man 
ever needs to stand alone. There is no actual 
loss, for no good thing is ever failure. 



196 THE COMING RELIGION 

The fact of the death of Jesus, immediately 
taken into the consciousness of the race, and 
turned into an earnest of a broader humanity 
and a firmer faith, is the standing illustration 
of the working of this principle. But it is 
typical of what every true man and every good 
w^oman has had plenty of occasion to find out. 
The lesson tends, the more often it is repeated, 
to rise to the level of great spiritual exaltation. 
It comes not only to the people of sentiment and 
quick impulse, but it comes to the men of cool 
and practical common sense. Such men will 
tell you, in their confidences, of memorable 
experiences, when at the height of their lives, 
and under the pressure of effort and crisis, 
something akin to the almighty energy and 
peace has touched and lifted them up, and made 
the way of pain and sorrow the gate of a 
larger Aasion. Thus, one of the most keenly 
intellectual of men has told me how, in the 
most pressing times of need, he has turned 
to the unseen Power, and trusted himself to 
its motion, and has been borne up accordingly. 
Another strong man, too conscientious ever to 
be able to join any of the churches in the city 
of his home, told me once of a time of uncom- 
mon danger, when he had to bear the weight 
of a crushing public trust. He came literally 



CONCLUSIONS 197 

to know the meaning of the ancient words, 
" Underneath are the everlasting arms." The 
great spiritual forces come to us from the life 
of God by laws as sure as the conditions by 
which we can turn on the electrical energy. 

The coming religion will prove invincible 
by virtue of facts like these. These are the 
real miracles, albeit rational and orderly, 
which when once a man has seen, he cannot 
doubt. The secret of consolation at the heart 
of the old religion now comes to light. The 
secret is that God is with us in all our sorrows, 
and that we are never alone. No pain is 
wasted, but it constitutes a form of effort, for- 
ever lifting the world from its animalism 
towards the heights of friendliness and happi- 
ness. All who sorrow now make a great 
brotherhood of sympathy, and thus love grows. 
As Jesus did not die in vain but left the world 
better, so every true man leaves the world 
better; hence a new consciousness of the sig- 
nificance of life, whereby the mystery grows 
lighter. We are not here " at all adventure " ; 
we are builders and co-operators with God, 
sharers of His purpose and His work; His 
kingdom is a civilized world. This faith will 
bring about a new alignment of forces in the 
conduct of all practical affairs. 



198 THE COMING RELIGION 

In short, everything forces upon us the con- 
viction that this is a spiritual universe, whose 
great values, forever lifting themselves above 
the dust and toil of life, are justice, beauty, 
truth, and goodness. But a spiritual uni- 
verse is another name for God's world, and 
the names of God are Power, Wisdom, and 
Love. 

Out of all these considerations there finally 
emerges the star of an unquenchable hope. It 
is a hope, not merely for man in general and 
for the future of the race, but for the individual 
man also. Indeed we cannot imagine a valid 
and satisfying hope for the race, aside from the 
individual men who make the race. Whatever 
conception of the world spells life and not 
death for mankind, spells likewise life and not 
death for the individual. Only what constitutes 
personal worth constitutes worth for the race. 

The fact is, that we cannot lead the life of 
religion as we have described it, in the terms of 
conscience and duty, of trust and good will, 
with all our heart and mind and strength, 
and not live a life of hope. By some profound 
relationship of the vital and spiritual elements, 
more real than the iron and nitrogen that en- 
ter into the making of our bodies, faith and love 
and hope are made to go together in a sort of 



CONCLUSIONS 199 

inseparable combination. They are the con- 
ditions of the fullest health of body, mind, and 
spirit. At our highest and best we tend to 
hope, and when hope fades life droops. 

Moreover, though it may not seem so at first, 
this is an infinite hope. It cannot be satisfied 
with perishable and childish goods. It tran- 
scends finite limits. Wherever death stands, 
this marvelous hope always appears in the im- 
mortal sunshine beyond. It is as if the Master 
of Life forever forbids anyone to interpret the 
world into the terms of negation. Do you want 
fullness of life? Then go with the motion of 
life, and let yourself hope to the uttermost, as 
you trust and love to the uttermost. This is 
the practical way in which you make proof of 
the fact that the great life values belong to- 
gether. You cannot leave one of them out 
and be quite your whole self at your best work- 
ing power. Surely the mind that doubts and 
denies is not so strong as the mind that believes 
and hopes ! 

We have said Hope, and an Infinite Hope — 
a hope that means life — but we have not said 
and cannot say that which we hope for. That 
this must be so is of the nature of hope. It is 
an attitude, not a science, and this is all that is 
essential for man. Perhaps this is all that 



200 THE COMING RELIGION 

could be well for him. As it is not good for 
the child to be living the man's life in antici- 
pation, much less to know what his own fu- 
ture life will be, but rather to live the child's 
life with all his might, and be the best possible 
child ; and as the ground of his hope of becom- 
ing the best possible man lies in this simple at- 
titude, so we say of this present life: it is 
full of inexhaustible possibilities, crowded with 
the opportunity of love and noble deeds. Let it 
go on day by day, translating all manner of 
experiences into richness and unity. Let it 
gather daily new assurance of the presence and 
reality of the life of God; let it thus taste the 
quality of the eternal life. Let each man live 
this present life with all his might; let him 
take, as his natural birthright, the attitude of 
one who lives in hope, who looks upward and 
refreshes his soul with the sight of the sky; 
let him leave the rest to the Master of life, in 
whose good faith he trusts all. And so each 
year let him sing, as he presses toward the 
mystery of the everlasting light, " The best is 
yet to be/' 



ivn 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



m 



One copy del. to Oat. Div. 



jav i m^ 









m^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 632 324 6 



'M^JM 



